Diplomacy & Crisis News

Equitable distribution of equipment and medicines to fight COVID-19 is the only way out of the global crisis, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday, in remarks to a meeting of the advisory group making the case for investing in these tools. 

L'exceptionnel taux de participation au scrutin présidentiel français (près de 85 % au premier tour) et le déclin du Front national ont suscité une avalanche de commentaires euphoriques sur un « printemps de la démocratie ». Pourtant, des millions d'électeurs, loin de se déterminer à partir des (...) / France, Communication, Élections, Politique, Sondage d'opinion - 2007/05

The eruption of violence in the Kingdom of Eswatini in recent days is “deeply concerning”, amid reports that dozens of people have been killed or injured during protests calling for democratic reforms, the UN human rights office, OHCHR, said on Tuesday. In a statement later in the day, the UN chief called for "inclusive and meaningful dialogue", to end the violence. 

Ten years after South Sudan achieved independence, more children there are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance than ever before, the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF, said on Tuesday. 

Rémy Hémez propose pour le blog de Politique étrangère une analyse de l’ouvrage d’Anne Pouget, Les 200 meilleures ruses et tactiques de guerre de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Editions Pierre de Taillac, 2021, 192 pages).

Depuis quelques années, un regain d’intérêt pour la ruse se traduit par quelques publications en français[1]. Ce recueil de stratagèmes compilés par Anne Pouget, autrice de nombreux essais et romans historiques, prend place dans ce mouvement. Il est découpé en très courts récits (généralement dix à vingt lignes) de tactiques destinées à tromper l’adversaire, eux-mêmes regroupés en 12 chapitres thématiques (« ruser dans son propre camp », dissimulation », « tactique et mise en scène », etc.).

On retrouve dans ce livre toutes les grandes catégories de ruses. Par exemple, celles qui facilitent l’entrée dans une ville ou une place forte. On y lit évidemment l’un des exploits de Du Guesclin qui, en 1354, avec une trentaine d’hommes déguisés en bûcherons et en paysannes, surprennent les Anglais de la garnison du château de Grand-Fougeray. Certains procédés se répètent dans l’histoire, à l’instar d’« un coup faux un coup vrai ». Le général romain Cnaeus Domitius Calvinus, lors du siège de Luna envoie chaque jour ses troupes en exercice autour des murailles de la cité. Les assiégés finissent par ne plus y faire attention. Le temps est alors venu pour une attaque surprise. Cette ruse de désensibilisation a plusieurs échos dans l’histoire. Celui que lui donnent les Égyptiens en 1973 est particulièrement connu. Les ruses sont également employées pour des opérations spéciales, comme celle menée par les Israéliens à Entebbe en 1976 pour libérer les otages d’un détournement d’avion : « Tonnerre » voit notamment l’utilisation d’une Mercedes noire similaire à celle d’Amin Dada et de deux Land Rover identiques à ceux de ses gardes du corps. Les ruses navales sont regroupées en fin d’ouvrage. On y (re)découvre l’utilisation des « bateaux-tortues », premiers navires blindés de l’histoire, par les Coréens lors de la bataille de No Ryang en 1598, ou encore l’emploi de « bateaux-leurres », tel que le HMS Dunraven qui, pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, est maquillé en vapeur de commerce pour attirer les sous-marins allemands.

Riche et varié, cet ouvrage souffre néanmoins de quelques défauts. On regrette par exemple que, pour chaque stratagème présenté, au moins une référence ne soit pas associée. On déplore également la sous-représentation des ruses récentes (aucune postérieure à 1976). La guerre du Golfe (1990-1991), ou encore les conflits d’Afghanistan, d’Irak ou d’Ukraine offrent pourtant des exemples pertinents. D’ailleurs, il n’y a aucune évocation du cyber, pourtant au cœur de la question des stratagèmes aujourd’hui. Également, parfois, les descriptions manquent de précision (absence de date ou de lieu). Enfin, on remarque quelques erreurs factuelles. Pour n’en citer qu’une : « Fortitude » n’est pas uniquement l’opération chargée de faire croire que les Alliés vont débarquer dans le Pas-de-Calais, puisqu’une de ses composantes, « Fortitude North », vise notamment à accréditer l’existence d’une force alliée déployée au nord de la Grande-Bretagne prête à envahir la Norvège en mai 1943.

En démontrant bien que l’imagination et l’ingéniosité ont toute leur place aux côtés de la force dans l’art de la guerre, la lecture de ce petit format demeure agréable pour l’amateur d’histoire militaire.

Rémy Hémez

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[1] Voir notamment : Jean-Vincent Holeindre, La Ruse et la Force, Perrin, 2017, recension dans Politique étrangère n° 2/2017 et Patrick Manificat, Qui ruse gagne. Une anthologie de la tromperie guerrière, Histoire et Collections, 2020 recension dans Politique étrangère n° 4/2020

Eric Chu

Coronavirus, Asia

Given the opportunity, Taiwan has the power to help the United States. Together we shall overcome this pandemic by supporting a new global effort to manufacture and distribute vaccines.

Amidst a global pandemic, the parallel universe in which Taiwan enjoyed a reprieve underwent a reality check in May 2021, when the spread of the coronavirus spiraled out of control for the first time at the local level. As a reaction to the bad news, Taiwan’s major stock index experienced two of the largest plunges in history later that same month, trading at record volumes. Similarly, according to Bloomberg’s COVID resilience ranking, Taiwan plunges into the bottom half of the ranking to the forty-fourth, accentuated by a lagging vaccination drive and a resurgent outbreak.

Since then, the coronavirus-induced death rate in Taiwan has surged past 4 percent, well above the global rate at approximately 2.2 percent. As a former role model in coronavirus prevention, Taiwan’s fall off the pedestal was largely due to the current administration’s complacency and myopia, which it contracted during Taiwan’s coronavirus-free experience for most of the duration since the global outbreak.

The evidence had been clear from the beginning that the cornerstone to returning to normalcy is a vaccinated population. Yet not only was the government behind in procuring vaccines for 23.5 million citizens, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), Taiwan’s center for disease control, even rejected an offer by AstraZeneca to manufacture vaccines in Taiwan. In comparison to another fellow Asian country, Singapore has so far vaccinated 41.1 percent of its population to Taiwan’s single digital to date.

More notably, South Korea announced a vaccine partnership with the United States in May and has since emerged as a global vaccine production base with its fourth coronavirus vaccine contract manufacturing deal struck as of late June.

The United States also has a similar vaccine arrangement for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue partnership between the United States, India, Japan, and Australia. Under this dialogue, the Quad will finance, manufacture, and distribute at least 1 billion doses of safe and effective coronavirus vaccines by the end of 2022.

India, the world’s vaccine leader, produces 60 percent of the world’s overall vaccine needs. The United States and Japan finance the initiative, India makes the vaccines, and Australia helps with the logistics and delivery. 

All is not lost for Taiwan. A statement released by the White House on June 3 unveiled Washington’s strategy for global vaccine sharing. This was followed by a concrete reiteration by Jonathan Fritz in mid-June, where the deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian & Pacific Affairs commented on plans for the United States to partner with Taiwan to manufacture and distribute vaccines.

This U.S. gesture of goodwill already delivered 2.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to Taiwan in June but should also encourage Taiwan to proactively seek a vaccine manufacturing agreement following South Korea’s precedent with the Biden administration, perhaps alongside the island’s semiconductor partnership. On May 21, 2021, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a U.S.-South Korea vaccine partnership to expand vaccine manufacturing and scale-up global vaccine supplies.

Taiwan needs to seize this opportunity to end the vaccine drought for its population, and at the same time reinforce its Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the goal of building resilience.

President Biden said that it is “an ambitious new joint partnership that is going to boost vaccine manufacturing for global benefits and strengthen vaccinations to benefit the entire Indo-Pacific.” 

Taiwan and the United States’ partners can join together to launch an ambitious new partnership to boost vaccine manufacturing for the world’s benefit and to strengthen vaccinations to benefit the entire Indo-Pacific. Taiwan has much to offer these like-minded countries in achieving progress on health security while also standing to gain from this partnership—primarily by assuring Taiwanese that the island will not be short of vaccines in the years to come.

This is an opportunity for a global response to expand safe, affordable, and effective vaccine production and equitable access, to speed economic recovery and benefit global health.

As the former commander of The Central Epidemic Command Center during Taiwan’s response to H1N1 influenza during 2009, I know Taiwan offers a pharmaceutical capacity for vaccine rollout that could serve as a model for other places. Taiwan is a country with a universal health care system that ensures a digitized distribution network and stores patient data in a centralized manner. Domestically, such production facilities can also create jobs in management, quality control, and production that can benefit Taiwan’s economy.

Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the world meets a single disease and finds a single fate. We are at a turning point in the search for good health and vaccination. So it was during the Spanish flu. So it was during H1N1. While people are now divided into the vaccinated and the not, we still stand united together. Because there is no Taiwanese problem. There is no American problem. There is only a world’s problem facing the pandemic. Taiwan is eager to be a solution to that problem. Given the opportunity, Taiwan has the power to help the United States. Together we shall overcome this pandemic by supporting a new global effort to manufacture and distribute vaccines.

Eric Chu is a former Chairman of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang.

Image: Reuters.

Michael Lind

War, Americas

For generations, Americans opposed to foreign wars have warned that they might result in the conversion of American society into a garrison state. But there are other ways in which foreign policy can undermine the economic, political, and social foundations of a democratic republic like the United States, to the point at which it becomes a different kind of regime.

THE FEAR that a country’s foreign policy can warp its internal social order is a perennial anxiety, in the United States and elsewhere. Usually, it takes the form of the claim that warfare or imperialism will trigger the militarization and regimentation of society at home, transforming the homeland into what the political scientist Harold Lasswell, in an influential 1941 article, called “The Garrison State.”

The perception that domestic social order can be shaped by a country’s interactions with the rest of the world is correct and profoundly important. Curiously, however, this subject has been neglected in traditional Western political philosophy. Typically, Western political philosophers have promoted an ideal political regime, usually a slightly idealized version of their own—the polis for Aristotle, the bureaucratic monarchy for Hegel, liberal democracy for John Rawls. Questions of war, diplomacy, and trade have been afterthoughts.

But there is a minority tradition, exemplified by thinkers like Machiavelli, with his distinction between republics for expansion and preservations, and the German historian Otto von Hintze, that emphasizes the interaction between world politics and internal political structures. This approach is found as well in Alexander Hamilton’s argument from Realpolitik for the need for union among the American states which had separated from Britain. In Federalist Number 8, in the course of arguing that rival post-colonial confederacies in North America would become militarized because of mutual fear, Hamilton explains the different internal constitutions of liberal Britain and autocratic continental powers in terms of their respective geopolitical environments:

The kingdom of Great Britain falls within the first description. An insular situation, and a powerful marine, guarding it in a great measure against the possibility of foreign invasion, supersede the necessity of a numerous army within the kingdom. … This peculiar felicity of situation has, in a great degree, contributed to preserve the liberty which that country to this day enjoys, in spite of the prevalent venality and corruption. If, on the contrary, Britain had been situated on the continent, and had been compelled, as she would have been, by that situation, to make her military establishments at home coextensive with those of the other great powers of Europe, she, like them, would in all probability be, at this day, a victim to the absolute power of a single man.

For generations, Americans opposed to foreign wars have warned that they might result in the conversion of American society into a garrison state. But there are other ways in which foreign policy can undermine the economic, political, and social foundations of a democratic republic like the United States, to the point at which it becomes a different kind of regime. There are two other categories of American nightmares that can be discerned in addition to the garrison state. One is what I call the tributary state; the other, the castle society.

The garrison state is a regime that sacrifices domestic liberty to preserve national independence. The tributary state pursues the opposite strategy; it sacrifices national independence to preserve domestic liberty. In contrast to both of these, the castle society does not choose between national independence and domestic liberty; it fails to achieve either. Indeed, state institutions are so weak or corrupt in a castle society that describing it as a “society” rather than a modern, institutionalized, bureaucratic state is appropriate. Government institutions are too feeble to protect individuals even from rampant crime or terrorism on the country’s own soil, forcing individuals and associations who can afford to do so to withdraw into their own secured enclaves or to hire private security forces. In such a quasi-anarchic society, like that of the Wild West or Al Capone’s Chicago in the United States, there may be no formal restrictions on individual liberty, but in the absence of effective policing and non-corrupt judiciaries, personal and commercial freedom are hardly possible. The category of the castle society includes many countries that are colloquially described as “failed states.”

The four regimes—the democratic republic, the garrison state, the tributary state, and the castle society—can be envisioned with the help of a diagram, with one axis standing for national independence and the other axis standing for civil liberty:

 

NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE

CIVIL LIBERTY

 

High

Low

High

Democratic Republic

Tributary State

Low

Garrison State

Castle Society

 

IN THE twentieth century, opponents of U.S. intervention in great power struggles in Europe and Asia frequently argued that U.S. participation would inevitably turn America into a garrison state. In response, proponents of U.S. intervention in the world wars and of U.S. participation in international alliances flipped this argument on its head, claiming that failure to intervene to prevent the German conquest of Europe would force the United States to defend itself by becoming permanently militarized and mobilized.

Following World War I, President Woodrow Wilson argued that the United States must take part in the League of Nations, an international collective security system, in order to create a concert of power that could avert future great power conflicts. The alternative would be an endless cycle of world wars, in which the United States, whether it took part or remained on the sidelines, would have to be permanently armed and mobilized. In that case, Wilson told an audience in St. Louis in 1919:

We must be physically ready for anything to come. We must have a great standing army. We must see to it that every man in America is trained to arms. We must see to it that there are munitions and guns enough for an army that means a mobilized nation … And you know what the effect of military government is upon social questions. You know how impossible it is to effect social reform if everybody must be under orders from the government. You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation and under military orders.

The Roosevelt administration and its allies made a similar argument that the defeat of Nazi Germany and its allies in the short term would avert the necessity of permanently converting the United States into a “Fortress America” besieged in the Western Hemisphere by German and Japanese empires. Douglas Miller, a U.S. diplomat, warned that in a world dominated by the Axis empires: “We should have to be a whole nation of ‘Minutemen,’ ready to rush to arms at the first sight of invasion.” Lewis L. Douglas, Roosevelt’s former budget director, argued: “To retreat to the cyclone cellar here means, ultimately, to establish a totalitarian state at home.”

The same theme informs NSC-68, the 1950 Truman administration state paper that laid out what became the containment strategy toward the Soviet Union, rejecting the alternative strategies of the tributary state and the garrison state, without using those terms.

As the Soviet Union mobilized the military resources of Eurasia, increased its relative military capabilities, and heightened its threat to our security, some would be tempted to accept “peace” on its terms, while many would seek to defend the United States by creating a regimented system which would permit the assignment of a tremendous part of our resources to national defense. Under such a state of affairs our national morale would be corrupted and the integrity of and vitality of our system subverted.

The goal of the Cold War containment policy was to prevent the Soviet bloc from ever obtaining so much relative power that Americans would be forced to choose between their national autonomy and their domestic liberty. According to NSC-68: “In essence, the fundamental purpose [of American strategy] is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.” 

Truman’s successor, President Dwight Eisenhower, made the same point in his famous warning about the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the American people on January 17, 1961: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex … We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or our democratic processes.”

Eisenhower’s speech is often misconstrued by those who claim that “war profiteers” control the government and are inventing fictitious threats to enrich and empower themselves. But that is not what Eisenhower argued. In the preceding paragraphs, he argues that the military-industrial complex, as dangerous as it is, is a necessary response to genuine foreign threats like the Soviet Union:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction … But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisations of national defense, we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

Generations of isolationists on the libertarian Right and anti-interventionists on the radical Left have caricatured Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and their successors as militarists. But these policymakers themselves argued for limited, defensive militarization and U.S. participation in the world wars and Cold War as a strategy that was less threatening to civil liberty and political pluralism than never-ending, defensive mobilization in a United States besieged in North America by triumphant Eurasian empires. From their perspective, the two wars against Germany and the Cold War against the Soviet Union were temporary preventive wars. Their aim was to prevent Imperial and Nazi Germany and the USSR from establishing direct control or obtaining informal domination over the major industrial nations of Europe and East Asia. They conceded that a few years of world war and a few decades of Cold War would warp civil liberty and democracy in the United States, but to a much lesser degree than would occur in an isolated, permanent Fortress America. 

Ironically, the celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh, one of the leaders of the anti-interventionist “America First” movement in the run-up to U.S. entry into World War II following the Pearl Harbor attack, agreed that the alternative to destroying the German and Japanese empires before they could be consolidated was creating an American garrison state. He thought it was a nifty idea. Lindbergh declared: “The men of this country must be willing to give a year of their lives to military training—more if necessary.” And Lindbergh called on the United States to invade its neighbors, to create a secure North American empire from which the Germans, Japanese, and others could be kept out. He demanded U.S. bases throughout North America “wherever they are needed for our safety, regardless of who owns the territory involved.”

None of this should give intellectual aid and comfort to today’s neoconservative advocates of “global democratic revolution” or “humanitarian hawks” who favor invasions of countries that do not threaten the United States to defend “human rights” or “the liberal world order.” On the contrary, both of these belligerent approaches to U.S. foreign policy are antithetical to the approach of mainstream U.S. policymakers during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson agonized over the effects that war might have on American society. Franklin Roosevelt told the American people, “I have seen war … I hate war.” In contrast, according to her memoirs, Madeleine Albright, favoring intervention in the war of the Yugoslav succession, a conflict of only remote and indirect interest to the United States, asked General Colin Powell: “What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”

Both interventionists and anti-interventionists in the United States, then, have maintained that their preferred policies would minimize the long-term threat that the American republic would be replaced by a militarized, Spartan garrison state. Advocates of intervention to prevent German or Soviet hegemony in Eurasia conceded that the temporary sacrifice of a degree of liberty and democracy during a war or cold war could be harmful, but would be less harmful to the way of life of a civilian, democratic, and liberal republic than the alternative—permanent defensive militarization of American society in an environment of regional empires and recurrent world wars. The anti-interventionists disputed this argument, claiming that U.S. participation in world war or cold war would turn America into a garrison state immediately and permanently.

Which side was right? One result of the global conflicts of the twentieth century has indeed been the emergence of a large, permanent military and defense industrial base, along with a permanent and powerful intelligence community. The world wars and the Cold War diminished the authority of Congress in foreign affairs, while giving the president vastly enhanced discretion in military affairs. Even worse, the “War on Terror” that followed the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, led a panicked Congress to delegate to the president the construction of a surveillance state which genuinely threatens the civil liberties of American citizens, who, for example, may be put on secret “no-fly lists” by government agencies without being told.

But even when these deformations of the American constitutional order are acknowledged, it is clear that the United States overall is not a garrison state. America is not an autocracy. There is no president for life; following Roosevelt’s four terms in the White House, the constitution was amended to limit a president to two terms. Indeed, two of the last four presidents have been impeached by Congress.

Conscription? Even at the height of the early Cold War in the Truman administration, proposals for universal military training were so unpopular with the public that the United States instead adopted the more limited selective service lottery system, which itself came to an end in 1973 following popular discontent with the costs of the Vietnam war.

Mobilization of industry? From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, successive presidents, singing the praises of “globalization,” complacently ignored the deindustrialization of the United States thanks to the offshoring of industry by U.S.-based multinationals, to China in particular. They also ignored the damage done to American industry by the mercantilist policies of U.S. allies like Japan, South Korea, and Germany. When Barack Obama left office in 2017, the U.S. military had to purchase rocket engines from Russia, U.S. astronauts had to hitch rides to the international space station on Russian rockets, and America had nearly lost its capacity to make many critical tech components including silicon chips. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed that the United States was almost completely dependent on Chinese factories for many crucial medical supplies, from masks to the chemical precursors used in common drugs. What kind of garrison state makes itself dependent for industrial supplies on a hostile strategic rival like China?

Overgrown military? In 1944, U.S. defense spending engrossed a third of GDP. Then, between 1945 and 1950, it plummeted to less than 5 percent. As a share of GDP, U.S. defense spending rose to 11.3 percent at the height of the Korean War in 1953 and 8.6 percent at the height of the Vietnam War—hardly Spartan levels of military consumption. Following the end of the Cold War, defense spending dropped to around 3 percent of GDP, a number to which it has returned after a brief uptick to 4.5 percent at the apex of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010. One may believe, as I do, that most of the small wars the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere are unnecessary, but a country that spends 3 percent of GDP on the military is not one in which military expenditure threatens to choke off the civilian economy.

As for the “standing army,” that nightmare of generations of Americans, the U.S. military has been radically downsized since the Cold War ended. The number of active-duty military personnel shrank from around two million in 1990 to a little more than a million today. Even when private contractors are considered, this has hardly the swollen military of a totalitarian state.

The American republic is not in danger of becoming a garrison state—not now, nor in the foreseeable future. But that is not to say the American republic is not in danger. The excessive militarization of society in a regimented state is not the only way that our republican social order can give way to a different kind of social order, with its own kind of foreign policy. America’s democratic republic could be warped to the point at which it ceases to be a democratic republic in all but name and morphs into a tributary state or a castle society.

THE BEST-KNOWN example of a tributary state, in the sense in which I am using the term, was Finland during the Cold War. The term “Finlandization” was coined by West German political scientists to describe the process by which Finland accommodated the Soviet Union in foreign policy, in order to maintain its nominal sovereignty and domestic autonomy. The term is unfair to Finland, because it is commonplace for small and weak states to pursue foreign policies that avoid provoking the wrath of powerful neighbors. This is certainly true in America’s neighborhood, where the United States in the last few generations has invaded the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, and Haiti while engaging in proxy war and covert action to install client governments in the region.

The lack of attention to tributary states by theorists of international relations is puzzling, because the category includes the vast majority of regimes in recorded history. Premodern empires and kingdoms were not centralized, bureaucratic states, but loose conglomerations of semi-autonomous lesser kingdoms, satrapies, provinces, city-states, duchies, bishoprics, and other entities. Typically, in return for fealty and tribute, the imperial government allowed a high degree of internal independence in subordinate units. Sovereignty in the modern sense did not exist in such systems; there were only degrees of suzerainty.

The ubiquity of premodern tributary states, including dominions and colonies of the European empires that enjoyed various degrees of self-government before post-1945 decolonization, suggests that the assumption of academic neorealist theory that most states seek to maximize their relative power is too simple. The mistake of crude realism is to confuse states with elites. If the state is not an autonomous agent but merely the instrument of a social elite—an assumption shared by Marxists, populists, and others—then it may be in the self-interest of a dominant elite to maintain or increase its own status within its local society by sacrificing the state’s external sovereignty and making it a protectorate of another regime, particularly if the foreign protector can guarantee the security of the local ruling class against challenges from below. To secure its status, the social elite may even give up national independence altogether in favor of annexation. This is what the Scottish elite did with the Act of Union of 1707 and what the short-lived Republic of Texas decided when it joined the United States as a state in 1846.

The Confederate States of America (CSA), had it survived the Civil War, would have been a de facto tributary state of the British empire—formally independent, but in practice an economic colony of industrial Britain. Apologists for the Confederacy who claim that the secession of the Southern states was motivated by fear of tariffs rather than the defense of slavery have always been unpersuasive. Nevertheless, it is true that the Confederate planter class planned for their agrarian economy to complement, rather than compete with, industrializing countries—including the United States as well as Britain, France, and Germany. In his First Inaugural Address, Confederate President Jefferson Davis made it explicit that the CSA would specialize in exporting cotton to the factories of Britain and the shrunken remnant of the United States, rather than seek to compete with them in manufacturing:

An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit. It is alike our interest, and that of all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities. There can be but little rivalry between ours and any manufacturing or navigating community, such as the Northeastern States of the American Union.

The South’s lack of the military-industrial capacity of the Northern state meant that an ignominious defeat was all but inevitable in the absence of British intervention. By the end of the Civil War, the Confederate elite was confronted with a stark choice: it could maintain its independence by centralizing power in the new national government, engaging in a crash program of state-sponsored industrialization from above, and perhaps freeing and arming Southern slaves—in other words, by revolutionizing the very social order that secession was supposed to preserve. In any event, following Reconstruction, the Southern oligarchy, through anti-Black terrorism and the repression of white populists, managed to restore and maintain a privileged position that was only undermined generations later by the mechanization of agriculture, the industrialization of the Sun Belt, and federal civil rights enforcement in the second half of the twentieth century.

Like the Southern planter class, many oligarchies in Latin America have preferred to be the dominant elites in de facto resource colonies that export commodities to the industrial nations rather than risk the loss of their own social positions that might result from the enrichment of the majorities in their countries by state-sponsored programs of national industrial modernization. And as Roberto Unger has pointed out, the refusal of Latin American countries to participate in the world wars, except at the margins, forestalled the danger that armed and mobilized masses would demand more political power and a greater share of the wealth in return for wartime sacrifice. A similar pattern can be seen in post-colonial regimes in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, in which reliance on exporting commodities like oil and gas allows local oligarchies to avoid empowering their subjects. In the case of the petrostates of the Persian Gulf, despotic monarchies like that of Saudi Arabia and Qatar do not even have to arm and enfranchise their own people to defend their countries; they can depend on the U.S. military to protect them.

THE FACT that socio-economic elites, not states, are the actual actors in world politics explains two puzzling historical episodes: the failure of Britain in the 1900s to respond to the rising industrial power of Germany and the United States, and the latter’s massive offshoring of its own manufacturing capability to Communist China from the 1990s to the 2010s. In each case, a powerful bloc of economic interests chose to sacrifice the national military power and independence of their own country to maximize their short-term personal profits.

Between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, Britain became the first industrial nation in the world by pursuing a sophisticated program of national development, based on protectionism, bans on the export of technology, skilled immigration, and laws requiring its North American and Indian colonies to buy British manufactured goods rather than manufacturing for themselves. In the 1840s and 1850s, no longer needing to protect its domestic industries and seeking to open up export markets, the British abruptly abandoned protectionism and began to preach global free trade. Free trade, they hoped, would help to lock in Britain’s lead in manufacturing by encouraging Britain’s trading partners to forego manufacturing for themselves, while competing with each other to provide British factories with cheap inputs like cotton and other raw materials and British factory workers with cheap food.

Most Latin American countries, along with the short-lived Confederate States of America, accepted the offer to function as resource colonies for industrial Britain. But the British offer was rejected by the United States during and after the Civil War and by Imperial Germany after it was consolidated in 1871. Abraham Lincoln’s America and Otto von Bismarck’s Germany used protectionism and other policies to build up their own industries to compete with those of the United Kingdom. 

By the late nineteenth century, British manufacturers were being driven out of their home market as well as global markets by floods of American and German imports. Members of the British “national efficiency school”—a diverse coalition of liberal nationalists like Joseph Chamberlain, hawkish conservative imperialists and technocratic collectivists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw—called upon Britain to defend its industrial might by consolidating the entire British empire, or perhaps only the home islands and “white dominions” like Canada and Australia, into a single protected market.

Instead, Britain clung to the unilateral free trade policy which it had adopted in the mid-nineteenth century, and which had made sense only when Britain had no major industrial rivals. The warnings of the national efficiency school were vindicated when Britain was subjected to attack by technologically-advanced Germany in the two world wars, while losing even industries it helped to invent like the jet airliner and television and computer industries to the United States. Today, post-imperial Britain is, in effect, a tributary state of the United States.

Why did Britain spurn the protectionist industrial policies that might have preserved more of its manufacturing leadership and military power a century ago? The reason is simple—the British elites which benefited from free trade, chiefly the financial interests of the City of London, had more influence over British policy than British manufacturers. British investors were not threatened by the American imports that wiped out factories in the British midlands. Indeed, while high tariffs kept out American manufactured goods, American industry welcomed British investment. British rentiers were enriched by their overseas investments even as British industry declined.

The pattern has been recapitulated in the United States, from the end of the Cold War to the present. In one industry after another, American corporations have offshored production to China since the 1990s, rendering the U.S. dependent on Chinese factories for many critical supply chains and manufactured goods, from iPhones to drugs and personal protective equipment that were essential in the Covid-19 pandemic. The toleration by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations of this massive transfer of industrial power from the United States to the Chinese dictatorship, a regime seeking to eliminate U.S. hegemony in Asia and the world, is an even more remarkable case of national military-industrial suicide than that of Britain a century earlier. It is as though the British parliament in the 1900s had encouraged the offshoring of British industry to Imperial Germany, even while engaging in the Anglo-German arms race.

As in Britain in the 1900s, in the United States in the 2000s capitalist elites with no interest in the health of the national industrial base—the managers and shareholders of Silicon Valley companies like Apple that were offered cheap labor and subsidies by the Chinese dictatorship, Wall Street firms salivating at the prospect of access to Chinese financial markets, and agribusiness corporations that are content to export foodstuffs to China in return for manufactured imports—defeated the U.S. military elites and America’s national manufacturers who viewed China as a threat. The struggle between these domestic coalitions explains the paradox of American policy toward China. America’s financial and commercial elites for the most part welcome the role of the United States as a deindustrialized resource colony of industrial China, as long as they can make money accessing China’s vast domestic market and pool of cheap, unfree labor, while American military hawks and populists and the remnant of private organized labor seek to decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies and rebuild American manufacturing. Paradoxically, given the ostentatious social liberalism of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, America’s tech elites and financial elites have adopted something like the voluntary tributary state strategy of Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders, with twenty-first-century industrial China replacing nineteenth-century industrial Britain as a source of manufactured imports, and a post-industrial United States which exports farm products, raw materials, and tourist and professional services to industrial Asia and Europe playing the role of the cotton-exporting Confederacy.

WHILE THE garrison state saves national independence by sacrificing civil liberty, and the tributary state sacrifices national independence to preserve civil liberty (at least for local elites), the castle society sacrifices the state and loses both national independence and civil liberty.

If Cold War-era Finland symbolizes the tributary state, Somalia or post-Gaddafi Libya might symbolize the castle society today. The erosion or collapse of state institutions and central authority produces anarchy, in which individuals and communities are forced to defend themselves or seek protection from stateless mafias or insurgent groups.

Elements of the castle society have always existed in the United States. The movement of settlers into Western frontier areas in advance of adequate law enforcement produced the anarchic conditions of “the Wild West,” with bloody clashes among native Americans and settlers and widespread crime. Criminal gangs, often specializing in the sale of prohibited alcohol and drugs, have dominated urban neighborhoods in many American cities over the generations, sometimes in collusion with corrupt police and politicians. For its part, between Reconstruction and the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, the American South was a de facto state-within-a-state, with the paramilitary Ku Klux Klan often allied with the local social and political elites who controlled the one-party Democratic regime. In the post-World War II era in which U.S. troops occupied Japan and parts of Germany, the federal government was still struggling to assert its authority in the states of the former Confederacy.

A democratic republic is defined in part by the limitation of the objects of government. But within its legitimate realm, a democratic republican government must be able to protect its citizens from invasion, crime, economic immiseration, and disease—at least in part through public agencies staffed by civil servants and soldiers who are paid out of taxes.

The high-water mark of democratic republicanism in the United States was reached in the decades after World War II. Without becoming a tyranny, the government was strong enough to protect the borders, dismantle racial segregation, regulate the economy, eliminate diseases like polio, and wage cold war against the Communist bloc. At the same time, informal checks and balances operated in the social sphere, with powerful trade unions, political parties, and churches exercising what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “countervailing power” against concentrated industrial capital.

In contrast, the last half-century has seen the replacement of nation-building by nation-dismantling in the United States, at the hands of an increasingly homogeneous, rich, and powerful national oligarchy. The American managerial elite has crushed organized labor, to the point that fewer private-sector workers—around 6 percent—enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining than was the case under President Herbert Hoover. The political parties, once federations of autonomous state and local organizations, have become mere labels captured by billionaires who, like Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg, view the national political parties as brands to be captured.

America’s managerial elite, based now more in Silicon Valley and Wall Street than in the old industrial sectors of oil and gas and manufacturing, have employed tax avoidance to starve the federal government of revenue, by means of offshore tax havens. In 2015, for example, U.S.-based multinationals reported 43 percent of their foreign earnings as coming from five notorious tax havens—Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland—even though only 4 percent of the workforce of the same companies resided in these jurisdictions. Like many American corporations, many of America’s rich are scofflaws, using tax shelters to avoid paying taxes. And those who do pay taxes frequently benefit by paying a lower tax on capital gains than cashiers and janitors and truckers pay on their labor income.

Using libertarian ideology as an excuse for slashing the government’s capacity to provide basic public order, the bipartisan American elite in the last half-century has “deinstitutionalized” many of the mentally ill—with the result that every large American city has a homeless population of individuals suffering from untreated psychiatric disorders or drug addiction. Meanwhile, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the U.S. government has tolerated the migration of millions of illegal immigrants to the United States to provide American employers with a pliant, low-wage workforce which is unprotected by labor laws and civil rights. 

“Authoritarianism” has been redefined in American public discourse to stigmatize what were formerly considered ordinary functions of government. For example, attempts to crack down on cross-border labor trafficking are often met with cries of “fascism!” In the summer of 2020, following the death in police custody of George Floyd, left-wing calls to “defund the police” contributed to the greatest wave of vandalism and murder in American cities since the urban riots of the 1960s.

As the public realm has been taken over in much of the country by mentally ill and sometimes dangerous vagrants, drug addicts, criminal gangs, and left-wing Antifa protestors, many Americans have retreated to fortified homes in suburban or rural areas and bought guns to defend themselves. Following the example of the Latin American upper classes, America’s managerial oligarchs tend to live in secure apartment towers or gated communities with their own private security forces. Many of the same progressive elites who denounce the idea of a wall on the American border pay top dollar for the walls that protect them and their families from anarchy and squalor inside American borders.

Not content to allow public authority to wither, America’s new ruling class has begun to govern the American people informally but directly, through the “private” institutions it controls—social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and retail platforms like Amazon as well as by older infrastructures like the banking system. Twitter purged a president of the United States. YouTube and Amazon “disappear” content at variance with the left-wing social norms of the American plutocracy and its professional-class courtiers. The United States is drifting ever closer to adopting a Chinese-style “social credit” system that freezes citizens guilty of wrongthink out of bank loans, savings accounts, and air and bus and rail travel—albeit a social credit system run by nominally private corporations and financial institutions.

IN THE middle of the twentieth century, a case could be made that prolonged mobilization for war threatened to turn the United States into a garrison state. Today, despite numerous small peripheral wars and the overhang of presidential emergency powers from earlier crises, the United States is in less danger of becoming a garrison state than ever. The greatest threat to America’s future comes not from a totalitarian state bureaucracy in Washington, DC, but from unchecked private power at home and authoritarian state capitalism abroad.

Saving the United States from geopolitical weakness and domestic chaos requires a reassertion of the democratic republican state, at the expense of oligarchs at home and hostile great powers and labor- and drug-trafficking gangs abroad. Such a limited rebuilding of national state capacity will not turn America into a garrison state. But it may save the American republic from degenerating into a combination of a tributary state and a castle society.

Michael Lind is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a columnist for Tablet, and a fellow at New America. He is the author of The New Class War (2020) and The American Way of Strategy (2006).

Image: Flickr / The U.S. Army

Washington and its allies need a shared semiconductor strategy. Only then will they be able to protect their national security and stave off another economic crisis.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

Most fighter pilots developed a grudging respect, even admiration, for pilots of the opposite uniform. Shooting each other down was nothing personal. It was not about killing a man; it was about killing a machine.

Key Point: The first large-scale American bombing raid deep into the Reich with fighter protection all the way took place on January 11, 1944.

Unlike bomber crews that went home if they survived a designated number of missions, World War II fighter pilots like Lieutenant Jim Carl, 354th Fighter Group, United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), flew until the war ended, they got shot down over enemy territory and were captured, or they died.

“If you get through five missions,” Major “Pinky” O’Connor, one of three squadron leaders of the 354th, bluntly told replacements, “you will probably get smart enough to survive.”

America’s premier aircraft when the United States entered World War II were the heavily armed Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, nicknamed “The Jug” because of its bulk, and the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Due to their limited range, however, neither was able to provide long-distance cover for bombers on missions into Nazi territory over occupied Europe, which left the bombers unprotected and vulnerable. The appearance of the North American P-51 Mustang, considered the best all-around fighter plane of World War II, changed the character of the Allied air war.

Its development was due not to the Americans, but instead to the British. A U.S. airplane manufacturer built it to British specifications in 1941, prior to the United States entering the fight. The early model lacked power at higher altitudes, but the 1942 version fitted with a Rolls Royce Merlin engine attained a top speed of 440 miles per hour, an altitude capacity ceiling of 30,000 feet, and an extended range that enabled it to provide fighter protection all the way from England to Poland and back, a round trip of 1,700 miles. It could outrun, outclimb, and outdive any fighter fielded by the enemy.

“When I saw Mustangs over Berlin,” Reichmarschall Herman Göring, commander of the German Luftwaffe, is said to have commented, “I knew the jig was up.”

The 354th Fighter Group, flying P-51 Mustangs and composed of three squadrons—354th, 355th, and 356th—deployed to Kent, England, in 1943 to fly escort for Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and Consolidated B-24 Liberators on long-run bombings into Nazi territory. During its short tenure in Kent, the 354th shot down 68 enemy planes and lost 23 of its own.

“Your job,” the commanding general of the USAAF told the new unit, “is to achieve air superiority.”

Allied tactical air forces pounded the Luftwaffe relentlessly in the air and on the ground during the months prior to the Normandy D-Day invasion in order to achieve that superiority. Massive wide-ranging air assaults knocked out roads and rail lines, bridges, enemy convoys, troop movements, artillery emplacements, armor, and other targets of opportunity.

The first large-scale American bombing raid deep into the Reich with fighter protection all the way took place on January 11, 1944. Targets for the strike force of 663 B-17s and B-24s were Luftwaffe airplane and parts factories in Oschersleben, Halberstadt, and Brunswick. Fighter support consisted of 11 groups of P-47s, two groups of P-38s, and a single group of 49 P-51 Mustangs. The short-range American fighters had to turn back, but the Mustangs proved more than a match for the Luftwaffe interceptors, destroying a number of enemy fighters while suffering no losses of their own.

Two weeks after D-Day in June 1944, the 354th Group moved into France to support the Allied advance and take on Göring’s Luftwaffe. Lieutenant Jim Carl, a lanky native of Quapaw, Oklahoma, and fresh out of flight training on the P-51, linked up with the group a month later and was assigned to the 356th “Red Ass Squadron.” Squadron leader Major “Pinky” O’Connor had unintentionally coined the nickname after a long flight when he climbed out of his Mustang rubbing his butt and groaning, “Aiieee! Is my ass ever red!”

The squadron’s official emblem became a cartoonish red donkey wearing a broad grin.

Like most new pilots thrown into the mix, Carl had to learn his craft quickly. He began to count off the missions until he reached the magic number of five.

His first mission turned out to be anticlimactic. At the controls of Quapaw Squaw, named after his hometown, he flew wingman to “Pop” Young on a bomber escort. At 24, Pop was one of the older flyers. Carl was 21.

En route, the raiders flew over lines of grooves marking the World War I trenches that scarred the French countryside. Lieutenant Carl stared in disbelief, his thoughts briefly on all the men who had died in those trenches—and now the Americans were back again.

Over the target, an enemy airfield, the clear sky exploded with flak and antiaircraft fire. It seemed a miracle that a single airplane might make it through unscathed. Carl was reckoning himself a goner—and on his first mission at that—when Pop Young reported engine trouble. As his wingman, Carl turned back with Pop to escort him to base.

Four missions to go.

Lieutenant Carl’s second mission involved an air-to-ground attack on a freight train loaded with fresh troops and supplies steaming across a wide plain toward the German front. Armed with quad .50-caliber machine guns and two 250- or 500-pound bombs mounted on wing racks, the P-51 excelled in ground attack and support as well as in air combat.

In a long line, the Mustangs made runs on the train at more than 400 miles per hour while German troops in green and gray uniforms on flatcars unlimbered their cannons and machine guns on the attacking fighters.

Carl rolled Quapaw Squawdirectly at the approaching locomotive and strafed the train all the way to its caboose. Tracers from German machine guns flashed through the formation like meteors. A train wheel blasted into the air and whizzed past Carl’s cockpit.

He flew so low that he caught expressions on the faces of flatbed antiaircraft crews before they and their cars were reduced to kindling, blood, and bone chips. On his climb out, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the train derailed, cars overturned and smoldering, surviving troops running for the hills.

Three to go.

He acquitted himself well in air-to-air encounters and acquired a reputation for being cool and deadly under fire. During one dogfight, the 354th Group with 38 Mustangs engaged a superior force of 51 German Messerschmitt Me-109s and Me-110s. Buzzing like giant bees at 20,000 feet, planes of both teams mixed it up in a furious maelstrom of violence, ducking and darting and sweeping, muzzles flashing and flaming. A gnat against a distant cloud one moment quickly became a flying dragon spitting fire the next. There was no time for thinking at such speeds, only action.

Outflown and outgunned, the Germans broke off contact and fled with their figurative tails between their figurative legs. Quapaw Squawsurvived with only a few holes in her fuselage. Lieutenant Carl was still in the fight.

A few days later, about 40 planes from the 354th flew at 10,000 feet approaching an enemy ground installation when someone radioed an alarm: “Bogeys!” German Messerschmitts swarmed out of the clouds like frenzied hornets.

“Break left! Now!” Group leader Major Carl Depner ordered.

The formation broke in a single unit, jettisoning its bombs to lighten the planes for aerial combat. Mustangs climbed in waves and burst through the bogeys with guns blazing. Lieutenant  Carl swept onto an enemy aircraft’s backside and laid on his trigger, anticipating a kill.

His guns malfunctioned. He found himself defenseless and surrounded by vampires. His only recourse was to fly like hell in the middle of swarming airplanes all shooting at each other. Fighters, both enemy and friendly, exploded in bright balls of fire or streaked toward earth trailing smoke and flame.

Major Depner’s wingman, Boze, was shot down and killed. Moments later, Depner got hit. He pulled out of the fight and headed for home. Fire in the cockpit forced him to parachute out. That was the last anyone heard of him.

Those were the only American planes lost in the dustup, while the Germans lost nearly two dozen blasted out of the sky. And Carl had not fired a single shot.

This was Quapaw Squaw’s magic mission of five. Carl was beginning to think he might make it after all.

The Red Asses’ squadron leader, Major O’Connor, ballsy and cavalier, took care of his men and thereby commanded a great deal of respect. During a raid on a heavily defended German airfield, Carl sprayed a .50-caliber swath of destruction into enemy fighters caught by surprise on the ground. He pulled out of his run and circled at 1,000 feet. Several shattered Messerschmitts spewed flame and smoke into the air. A fire truck at the end of the asphalt runway near some concrete revetments had overturned and burst into flames. Tracers zipped up from hardened antiaircraft sites.

Major O’Connor was on the radio calling off the attack when Carl noticed an undamaged Me-109 partly concealed underneath a tree off to one end of the landing strip.

“Hallum Two,” he radioed Pinky. “I’m making another run on the bogey hiding underneath the tree.”

“Roger, Squaw Man.”

Carl dipped a wing into a belly-wrenching dive almost straight down at the parked aircraft. He felt the smooth stutter of his .50-caliber machine guns throughout his body as he gnawed up turf, the tree, and the Me-109. He zoomed through the black and red ball of gasoline flame he had ignited and pulled up in a wild, weaving flight through streams of tracers attempting to bring him down.

Typically, Major O’Conner never left one of his fighters alone in a fight. While Carl was taking care of the hidden Me-109, O’Connor was raising hell at the opposite end of the airfield, creating a diversion. When the squadron returned to base near Cherbourg, Pinky had almost as many holes in his Mustang as Carl had drilled through the parked Me-109.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Carl scold­ed him. “You didn’t have to make another run.”

“I did it to give you a chance,” the major replied with a shrug.

Shortly after that, Major O’Connor was shot down during a long escort of B-17s. He parachuted out directly on top of an SS gun crew.

Other pilots got shot down more than once and lived to tell about it. Captain James Edwards, a big, tall boy and winner of two Distinguished Flying Crosses, was busted out of the air twice and wrecked two other airplanes while trying to bring them home riddled by gunfire.

“You keep losing planes,” Carl admonished him, “and they’ll make you start paying for them.”

Even Quapaw Squawwas shot down on what was to be a routine sortie. Since that particular mission expected little or no contact, Carl allowed a rookie named Homberg to fly the Squaw.A battery of German 88s on the ground brought her down like a meteor. That was Homberg’s first and last mission.

Carl named his replacement Mustang Quapaw Squaw II.

Most fighter pilots developed a grudging respect, even admiration, for pilots of the opposite uniform. Shooting each other down was nothing personal. It was not about killing a man; it was about killing a machine.

In supporting the Allied advance after D-Day, the 354th basically followed General George Patton’s Third Army across France, into Belgium and the Battle of the Bulge, then across the Siegfried Line into Germany. Lieutenant Carl was up to 60 or so missions in his logbook, and the Red Asses were sweeping out ahead of Patton when he encountered an Me-109 jock in a one-on-one dogfight that could end only one way—with the destruction of one or the other.

Although the savage-looking Me-109s were not quite on par with the mosquito-like P-51s, they could be quite formidable when flown by a top-line pilot who knew his way around the sky. As a dozen or so Me-109s bounced the Mustangs out of the sun, Carl tacked onto an enemy plane that began twisting into maneuvers Carl would not have thought possible before now. The dogfight degenerated into a deadly game of tic-tac-toe played at speeds in excess of 400 miles per hour.

Carl seized the first advantage by grabbing onto the guy’s exhaust and zig-zagging with him through the air, sending tracers slashing after him. The Me-109 seemed to dive every time just before the bullets reached him.

The German suddenly switched positions with Carl in a maneuver so skillfully executed that it left Carl breathless with astonishment. The Me-109 was now on the American’s ass.

Carl feinted, bobbed, and weaved across the sky, trying to shake the Me-109 before tracers flashing past his cockpit caught him. The guy might fly like a superhero, but, fortunately, he could not shoot for crap. That was the only thing that saved the American.

The two fighter planes dueled it out for what must have seemed an eternity to the combatants. First one took the advantage, then the other, each unable to administer a fatal blow.

They broke apart and circled warily at a distance, each striving to fight out of the sun while forcing the other to fight into it.

They charged like gladiators, weapons blazing. Lead spanged into Quapaw II’s fuselage. The fighters passed wing tip to wing tip at a combined speed of more than 800 miles per hour. Carl glimpsed his rival’s face—young and encased in a brown aviator’s cap, ear pieces loose, intense and concentrated—nothing like the gross caricatures on the “Know Your Enemy” propaganda posters.

Carl pulled into a turn so sharp he thought his wings were ripping off. That put him back on the hotshot’s tail. The German dived with Carl in pursuit, his aircraft vibrating at speeds beyond its red line. The earth below rushed at him.

The first one to “chicken out” would find himself at a crucial disadvantage, as it would permit the other a tail position in good machine-gun shape at a relatively slow recovery speed. The German bobbed and weaseled, making himself a difficult target and apparently determined to bury them both in the ground rather than pull out of his dive.

Carl glimpsed trees and fences coming at him. A farmhouse. Some geese flying.

At the last instant, just when it appeared both planes would crash, the German “chickened out” and leveled off just above the tree line. Evasion lay in his climbing to a more favorable level for maneuvering, which meant giving up precious speed and making himself vulnerable to his pursuer.

Tree branches quaked and bowed from the combined speed of the two fighters’ slipstreams. Carl anticipated his foe’s next move and caught the Me-109 in his sights as it pulled up and out. He squirted it with his quad-50s, tumbling it through the low air like a pheasant shotgunner in flight. It burst into bright flames as it struck the ground. Burning parts of it exploded in all directions. No pilot could have lived through such a conflagration.

Momentary sadness and guilt overcame Lieutenant Carl as he pulled back on Squaw II’s throttle and circled the field, wagging his wings in tribute. He thought he might have liked to have congratulated the German over a cup of coffee on a duel well fought.

P-51 Mustangs flew 213,873 sorties during the war, losing 2,520 planes to all causes, including enemy action. In turn, Mustangs shot down 4,950 enemy aircraft, a feat second only to the carrier-borne Grumman F-6F Hellcat used in the Pacific War.

The three squadrons of the 354th Fighter Group in Europe destroyed more enemy aircraft in aerial combat, 701, than any other while losing only 63 of their own pilots.

Jim Carl flew 86 combat missions with the Red Ass Squadron, won two Distinguished Flying Crosses, and left the USAAF as a lieutenant colonel. He lost a lot of friends during the final year of the war.

Charles Sasser is the author of the classic book of sniper warfare titled One Shot-One Kill. He has written dozens of other books and articles and appeared on numerous television networks including ABC, Fox, the History Channel, and CNN. He is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Special Forces. He resides in Chouteau, Oklahoma.

Originally Published November 22, 2019.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

The Soviet's successful defense greatly disrupted Hitler's plans and marked a turning point in the conflict. 

Key Point: Dug in on the battlefield were the forward elements of a fresh division from the Soviet Union’s Far East Military District that had been rushed to Moscow to thwart the German drive on the Soviet capital.

The troops of Germany’s Army Group Center were more than a week into a fresh offensive to capture Moscow on July 14 when they approached the historic battlefield of Borodino where the Russians delayed Napoleon’s advance on Moscow in 1812. Dug in on the battlefield were the forward elements of a fresh division from the Soviet Union’s Far East Military District that had been rushed to Moscow to thwart the German drive on the Soviet capital.

The burly men, outfitted in fur caps, great coats, and fur boots, belonged to Colonel Viktor Polosukhin’s 32nd Siberian Rifle Division, which had arrived from Vladivostok by rail and reached the old battlefield several days earlier. As soon as they arrived, they entrenched and constructed emplacements for their artillery. Stalin had reinforced the division’s three rifle regiments—the 17th, 113th, and 322nd —with two armored brigades equipped with T-34 and KV-1 tanks.

Approaching their position were elements of General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4. Hoepner had tasked Lt. Gen. Friedrich Kirchner, commander of the 10th Panzer Division, with the destruction of the troops in and around Borodino. Kirchner assigned some of his best units for the hard fighting that lay ahead.

The tactical plan called for Colonel Bruno Witter von Hauenschild to lead his infantry brigade and the SS Reich Motorized Infantry Division in a frontal assault while the 7th Panzer Regiment moved to outflank the Siberians. The attacking armor and infantry were supported by Stuka dive bombers, 88mm flak guns, and Nebelwerfer rocket launchers.

As the battle unfolded, T-34 medium tanks counterattacked in mass formations. The Germans put their powerful 88mm flak guns to work as tank busters. Soviet artillery units and mortar batteries blasted the German grenadiers as they fought their way forward through minefields and barbed wire.

The slugfest at Borodino lasted for nearly a week before threats from the flanks forced the Soviets to retreat. The 32nd Rifle Division was mauled by the Germans, although it inflicted grievous losses on the attacking German units; for example, the Third Infantry Regiment of the SS Reich Motorized Infantry Division suffered such heavy losses that it had to be disbanded and its survivors distributed to other regiments in the division. Nevertheless, the Germans pushed on to the next Soviet line of defense, the Mozhaisk Line. Stalin believed that the 17th Rifle Regiment in particular had fought with great valor, and he therefore awarded it the Order of the Red Banner.

On June 22, 1941, the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack involving 3.6 million German and other Axis troops organized into 153 divisions. Hitler and his generals had organized the attacking troops into three army groups for the invasion, which was codenamed Operation Barbarossa. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North was ordered to push toward Leningrad, Field Marshal Fedor Von Bock’s Army Group Center was tasked with capturing Moscow, and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South was sent into the Ukraine to secure the Donets Basin. The Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the German Army High Command, believed that the Red Army could be defeated west of the Dvina-Dnieper line, but it had not developed contingency plans if that did not occur as expected.

Despite suffering devastating losses early in the campaign, the Red Army did not collapse. It was able to hold itself together through the grim determination and draconian measures instituted by the ruling Communist party. The German timetable for a lightning-fast campaign to occupy all of the European Soviet Union within four months slowly began to unravel. Although German panzer formations continued their push eastward, infantry divisions fell far behind, not only because they lacked mechanized transport, but also because they had to methodically eliminate large pockets of Red Army troops.

Army Group Center became embroiled in a two-month-long slugfest known as the Battle of Smolensk in July. The battle raged over a swath of territory that was 400 miles long and 150 miles deep. It began on July 10 when General Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 and General Herman Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 advanced from Vitebsk toward Dukhovschina and Orsha toward Yelnya. Their objective was to encircle the Soviet 16th, 19th, and 20th Armies. During the titanic clash, the Germans were startled by the effectiveness the Soviet of T-34 medium tank and KV-1 heavy tank, Katyusha rocket launcher, and IL2 Sturmovik ground attack aircraft. These weapons platforms awed the Germans and they had no choice but to acknowledge that the Soviets had made impressive strides in military technology. 

The T-34 medium tank was superior to any tanks the Germans had in action at the time. The T-34 outclassed the German Army’s Panzer IV in many respects, including speed, armament, and armor. Its 76mm long gun was more effective than the Panzer IVs short-barreled 75mm gun. The two Soviet tanks had sloping hull and turret armor that enabled them to withstand all but the heaviest German antitank guns. Last but not least, both the T-34 and KV-1 had wide treads that gave them better traction on mud and snow than the German tanks.

Hitler and the generals of his personal staff in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) clashed sharply with the OKH generals in regard to how Barbarossa should proceed. The two highest ranking generals of the OKH were Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the Army, and General Franz Halder, chief of OKH general staff. They led a faction that believed that the capture of Moscow would destroy the Red Army’s morale and quickly win the war. They were supported in this belief by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, and his hard-charging panzer generals Guderian and Hoth. As for Hitler, he had long favored the destruction of the Soviet field armies over capture of key objectives such as Moscow. Thus, Barbarossa had been a compromise of sorts between the opposing viewpoints.

But after nearly two months of hard fighting in which Army Group North and Army Group South had encountered difficulties, Hitler for all intents and purposes postponed the drive on Moscow by Army Group Center to reinforce the other two army groups. He ordered Hoth’s panzers to reinforce Army Group North and Guderian’s panzers to reinforce Army Group South. Valuable time was lost while Guderian assisted in the destruction of the General Mikhail Kirponos’ Southwestern Front in the month-long Battle of Kiev that began in late August.

In early September, while the Battle of Kiev was still raging, Hitler believed that success on the northern and southern flanks had made a concerted push in the center imperative to bring about the total collapse of the Soviet resistance. Furthermore, he wanted to secure the economic resources of the Ukraine and shore up the flanks of Army Group Center.

Führer Directive 35, which was issued September 6, set forth that the successes on Barbarossa’s flanks had made it possible to resume the advance in the center against Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s Western Front. Timoshenko’s front “must be destroyed decisively before the onset of winter,” the directive stated. With this in mind, von Bock and his staff developed a plan for the final push on Moscow, codenamed Operation Typhoon. In the initial stage of the operation, Panzer Groups 2, 3, and 4 were to surround and destroy the bulk of the Red Army forces facing Army Group Center in and around Vyazma and Bryansk. Next, the panzer groups would swing north and south of Moscow and link up at Noginsk, 20 miles east of the Soviet capital. The northern pincer, composed of the Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 and General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, would strike at Moscow from the northwest through the city of Kalinin, while the southern pincer, Panzer Group 2, was to advance on Moscow from the southwest through Tula. Meanwhile, General Gunther von Kluge’s 4th Field Army would advance directly toward Moscow from the west.

German forces for Operation Typhoon numbered approximately two million men, 1,700 tanks and assault guns, 14,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and 780 aircraft. Despite seemingly large numbers overall, German units began showing signs of fatigue. Attrition of men and matériel exceeded expectations and replacements did not keep pace with casualties. This situation was especially serious in motorized formations, where loss of tanks and tracked and wheeled transport seriously affected the combat efficiency of the panzer divisions.

Despite the attrition, morale was high and German troops were confident of victory. “The last decisive battle of this year will deliver a destructive blow to the enemy,” exhorted Hitler. “We will remove the threat to the German Reich and all of Europe, which has existed since the time of the Huns and the Mongols, of an invasion of the continent.”

Deployed east of Smolensk, Army Group Center was opposed by Lt. Gen. Ivan Konev’s Western Front, Marshal Semyon Budyonny’s Reserve Front, and Lt. Gen. Andrey Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front. The armies that made up the three Soviet fronts were exhausted from the sustained heavy fighting. Their effective strength at the time was 1,250 men, 1,000 tanks, and 7,600 artillery guns.

The Russians used rivers as defensive positions, especially the Desna River in the area of operation of the Bryansk Front; however, Soviet defenses lacked deployment in depth, continuous defensive lines, and sufficient antitank artillery. Soviet formations, especially those of the Western and Bryansk Fronts, were brittle after tremendous losses sustained during the summer fighting. To assist the hard-pressed fronts facing Army Group Center, Stavka concentrated reserves and equipment on the most threatened directions, particularly along the two highways leading to Moscow from the west. 

Having the farthest distance to travel, Guderian’s Panzer Group 2, which was deployed on Army Group Center’s southern flank, was given a lead of three days over the other panzer groups. Guderian had some of the best units in the German Army. He had at his disposal five panzer divisions, four motorized infantry divisions, and the Grossdeutschland Motorized Infantry Regiment. Despite attrition, he still had 300 tanks.

Guderian’s panzer units began their advance on September 30 against Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front. They caught Maj. Gen. Arkady Erm-akov’s Operational Group by surprise. When he reported the German attack to Yeremenko, he was instructed to counterattack. He sent his 30 light tanks against Kampfgruppe Eberbach of the 4th Panzer Division on October 1 only to see them turned into flaming hulks. Once through the porous Soviet defenses in this sector, the XXIV Panzer Corps reached Orel on October 3, while the XLVII Panzer Corps captured Bryansk on October 6.

The rest of Army Group Center attacked on October 2. On Guderian’s left, despite strong artillery and air support, the 2nd Field Army stalled in front of forward Soviet defenses along the Desna River in the face of determined Red Army opposition. Despite this, the 4th Field Army and Panzer Group 4 conducted a successful crossing of the Desna River and penetrated Soviet defensive positions up to 20 miles in several locations. In a similar manner, the 9th Field Army and Panzer Group 3, which were positioned on the left flank of Army Group Center, achieved substantial success and reached the Dnieper River on October 3.

Stavka’s orders to the Bryansk Front to form a new defensive line came too late to save it from destruction. The capture of Bryansk by the XLVII Panzer Corps trapped three armies of the Bryansk Front in two pockets. The 50th Army became trapped in the Bryansk pocket north of the city, and the 3rd and 13th Armies were surrounded in the Trubchevsk pocket south of the city.

Soviet fighters guard the skies above Moscow. German air strikes against the city began on July 22 and continued for four months.

Similarly, the 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions from Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4 closed the pincers east of Vyazma on October 10, thus trapping four armies of the Western and Reserve Fronts (19th, 20th, 24th, and 32nd) in a giant cauldron west of the city.

The outer encirclement rings initially were composed of German mobile formations that lacked the manpower to seal off all avenues of escape. The Soviet troops trapped in the pocket made repeated attempts to break out to the east. But as German infantry divisions moved up, the noose tightened around the Red Army troops and Luftwaffe aircraft unmercifully pounded their positions.

Some of the Red Army troops, their units astonishingly cohesive despite the constant shelling and bombing they endured, were able to escape their respective pockets during the following two weeks. They were reorganized and put in new defensive lines farther east. By the middle of October, the units still inside the Bryansk and Vyazma pockets began surrendering en masse. Although 85,000 soldiers escaped encirclement, the German Army captured 680,000 Soviet soldiers.

Even as the fighting continued in the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets, the first snow fell on October 7. The resulting snowmelt turned the Russian roads, most of which were unpaved, into a quagmire of mud. As a result, the German supply system slowed to a crawl. Heavy rains began a week later, heralding the arrival of the Rasputitsa (literally meaning time without roads) season in which travel on roads was extremely difficult because of muddy conditions. Rasputitsa, which occurs throughout Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine in the spring and fall, results from poor drainage of underlying clay-laden soils.

The Rasputitsa robbed the Germans of their mobility, which was one of their key advantages over Soviet forces. Vehicles broke down repeatedly or sunk to their axles in the sticky mud. Teams of men were commonly required to push and pull trucks and horse-drawn wagons out of the mud. Although Soviet forces also fell victim to the mud season, they had shorter supply lines than the Germans.

With the collapse of Soviet forward defenses, Stavka issued orders on October 9 for the creation of a new defensive line centered on the city of Mozhaisk, just 80 miles from Moscow. As survivors of Western, Reserve, and Bryansk Fronts trickled back, they reformed along the new defensive line. Western and Reserve Front units that had been mauled in combat were combined into the Western Front under the command of General Georgy Zhukov.

The Mozhaisk defensive line stretched for 180 miles in a shallow curve from the Ivankovo Reservoir on the Volga River north of Moscow to the city of Kaluga in the south. Zhukov, who was acutely aware that the 90,000 men under his command were woefully inadequate to create continuous defenses, concentrated his forces to defend main arterial roads leading to Moscow.

Even before pockets at Bryansk and Vyazma were eliminated, the Germans resumed the offensive toward Moscow. As they advanced, they exploited gaps in the Soviet defenses. The exhausted Red Army units gave way, and the Mozhaisk defensive line collapsed within a week. On the northern flank, Major Josef Eckinger’s advanced detachment of the Lt. Gen. Friedrich Kirchner’s 1st Panzer Division captured Kalinin on October 14, in the process cutting the Leningrad-Moscow railway and capturing an intact bridge over the upper Volga. This put the Germans in that area just 93 miles from Moscow.

To defend Moscow from the north, three right-flank divisions of the Western Front were reorganized into a new Kalinin Front under Lt. Gen. Ivan Konev. In the center, the Russian cities of Maloyaroslavets, Mozhaisk, Naro-Fominsk, and Volokolamsk all fell in quick succession to the Germans. By the end of October, German forces stood within 50 miles of Moscow.

As the Germans pressed ever closer, the Soviet State Defense Committee issued orders on October 15 for the evacuation of governmental, cultural, and industrial institutions, as well as foreign embassies, from Moscow. The next day, wholesale departure from the capital began to the east. The evacuation and resulting panic became known as Bol’shoi Drap (Big Bug-Out). For three days beginning on October 16 all semblance of order in Moscow collapsed. Factories, stores, and civil administration stopped working. Buses and street cars did not run. Officials at all levels attempted to use their positions to secure transport for themselves and their families out of the city. At some factories, management attempted to pay the workers before shutting down, while at others, officials fled with the money. Some food stores attempted to distribute the food on hand, while others were stormed and looted by the panicked populace. The Russians looted the warehouses, and criminals robbed and committed various atrocities with impunity.

Civil order broke down entirely as Moscow residents assaulted public officials who they believed had forsaken them. Train stations were thrown into chaos as crowds stormed the trains to secure a seat. Roads to the east became clogged with streams of trucks, cars, buses, and horse-drawn wagons surrounded by people fleeing on foot. In just a few days, the population of Moscow had been reduced almost by half.

When governmental institutions were evacuated, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and a handful of advisers assisted by skeleton staffs remained at their posts. The Soviet government on October 19 began reasserting order by draconian measures. Police and military patrols appeared on the streets in force. Captured looters and bandits were shot on the spot and within three days order was restored in the Soviet capital.

While lawlessness in Moscow was brought under control, the situation at the front became critical. On October 20 the State Defense Committee declared that Moscow was under siege. Three concentric defensive positions with extensive earthworks were established around the city. Stavka put Zhukov in charge of the outer perimeter and placed Lt. Gen. Pavel Artemyev, commander of Moscow’s garrison, in charge of the city defenses.

The first defensive ring was an outer perimeter, the second defensive ring ran along Moscow’s suburbs, and the third defensive ring was in the heart of downtown Moscow. Approximately 100,000 civilians from Moscow and its vicinity, three-quarters of whom were women, furiously labored mainly with picks and shovels to erect antitank obstacles and dig antitank ditches. Inside the city, the garrison and the workers’ militia were tapped to defend an array of defenses that included barricades, antitank ditches, and gun emplacements. Unbeknown to the civilians, the majority of strategic objectives in Moscow were mined for demolition. Steps were taken to deal with every possible contingency; for example, resistance cells were organized to continue the struggle should the city fall to the Germans.

The Soviets created a formidable air defense system for Moscow consisting of one aviation and one air-defense corps. The 6th Fighter Corps numbered 600 aircraft, almost half of which were fighters. The 1st Air Defense Corps was armed with 1,000 antiaircraft guns and 300 quad machine guns. The defenders placed antiaircraft guns and machine guns on the roofs of Moscow’s buildings. To pinpoint the German aircraft they used hundreds of searchlights, and to thwart flights over the city they launched barrage balloons. German aviators, many of whom were veterans of the London Blitz, said that they had never encountered as dense a curtain of antiaircraft fire as they did over Moscow.

The Germans had made their first major aerial bombardment of Moscow on July 22, 1941. In that bombing mission, 220 Luftwaffe aircraft had attacked in four waves over a period of five hours. Although Soviet air defenses took a heavy toll on German aircraft, air raids on Moscow steadily escalated, peaking in November of that year. The bombing continued steadily until June 1943. In total, the Germans destroyed 6,000 buildings and killed an estimated 2,000 civilians.

On October 26, delayed by bad weather and fuel shortages, leading elements of the 2nd Panzer Army arrived before the city of Tula, the traditional center of the Soviet Union’s armaments industry. Survivors of Soviet 50th Army, after breaking out of the Bryansk pocket, conducted a fighting retreat to Tula, where the army was reorganized and reinforced.

A large militia regiment formed from the city’s workers took an active part in the city’s defense. Shifting the majority of the available fuel and ammunition to his leading XXIV Panzer Corps, Guderian launched repeated attacks against the city. Although the Germans reached the outskirts of Tula, they got no farther. While the fighting raged, Tula’s factories worked around the clock producing ammunition and repairing vehicles. Unable to capture Tula, Guderian was forced to swing east in an attempt to reach Moscow on a parallel route through Kashira. By this time, the German advance had ground to a halt as a result of exhaustion and heavy attrition. Indeed, many of the German divisions were down to one-third of their men and equipment. OKH ordered a halt to offensive operations on October 31.

Stalin’s determination and willingness to defend Moscow at all costs had paid off. A month earlier, on the same day that Guderian kicked-off Operation Typhoon, a conference took place in Moscow between Soviet, American, and British representatives. The United States had been providing economic assistance to the United Kingdom in its struggle against Hitler since January 1941. Stalin requested similar American and British assistance. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt agreed on October 30 to extend to the $1 billion in interest-free loans to the Soviet Union for purchases of armaments and raw materials. The Russians already were receiving equipment, such as Matilda and Valentine tanks and Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft, from the British government. It’s worth noting, though, that the British and Americans did not give the Russians their best equipment.

To stiffen the resolve of the Red Army and the Soviet people, Stalin ordered the traditional military parade held on November 7 in Red Square in Moscow. Several of his advisers recommended canceling the parade, but Stalin insisted. Many commanders expressed concern that the German bombers would stage a massive attack to disrupt the parade and kill the Soviet leadership. To guard against this threat, the Soviet Air Force began preemptive strikes against German forward airfields two days before the scheduled parade. The weather also cooperated, for low clouds and heavy snow were forecast for the event, thus reducing the concern of military officials.

The Moscow garrison, as well as units moving through the city to the battlefront, marched past Stalin and other senior leaders of the Soviet Union where they stood atop Lenin’s mausoleum on November 7. The show of determination was a great success. It demonstrated to the world the strengths of the Soviet people and their intentions to continue the fight against the invaders.

During the first week of December, frost formed on the roads in the Moscow region. The frozen ground enabled German units to move not only on the roads, but also through the countryside.

Up to that point, sporadic fighting had occurred on the Moscow front as both sides reinforced their positions. Compared to the situation in October, the Red Army’s condition improved significantly. Defensive positions of the three Soviet fronts stretched for 700 miles. Lt. Gen. Ivan Konev’s Kalinin Front held the right flank, Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s Western Front held the center, and Timoshenko’s Southwestern Front held the left. Stavka had dissolved the Bryansk Front and distributed its units between the Western and Southwestern Fronts.

As for Moscow, it was protected by artillery and engineer units positioned astride strategic roads into the city. Soldiers and civilians alike stoically braced for the German attack. Not content with static defense, Stalin constantly demanded that the Red Army units attack. Zhukov attempted to convince Stalin that the forces under his command were barely adequate for defense let alone attack; however, there was no persuading Stalin.

Zhukov, therefore, reluctantly ordered Lt. Gen. Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 16th Army to attack on October 16. Rokossovsky’s three depleted divisions were reinforced by the fresh 316th Rifle Division under Maj. Gen. Ivan Panfilov and the 1st Guards Tank Brigade under Colonel Mikhail Katukov. A task force consisting of Rokossovsky’s two rifle divisions, Katukov’s tank brigade, and two cavalry divisions under Maj. Gen. Lev Dovator were to retake the town of Volokolamsk on the Moscow highway.

While Rokossovsky was preparing his forces, Army Group Center renewed its offensive on November 15. Its objective was Klin, which was situated northwest of Moscow. The spearhead of Panzer Group 4 was General Rudolf Veiel’s 2nd Panzer Division, a relatively fresh unit. The division was outfitted with Panzer IIs, Panzer 38ts, and Panzer IIIs. It also had a small number of Panzer IVs.

 The main thrust of the German offensive fell on Panfilov’s 316th Rifle Division, which was the strongest division in Rokossovsky’s command. Arriving from Siberia in August, the division spent most of the time in the reserve and was involved in active fighting only since October. Panfilov’s division was bled dry after five days of fighting, having lost four-fifths of its personnel. Although they had inflicted heavy losses on the Russians, the Germans were able to make only minor inroads into the Soviet defenses. In many instances, they advanced less than two miles a day. The 2nd Panzer Division was not able to achieve its objective of capturing Klin by October 20. Nevertheless, the 7th Panzer Division of Panzer Group 3 captured the town three days later.

The situation was so dire that Stalin called Zhukov and demanded an honest answer as to whether Moscow could be saved. Zhukov replied that it could, but reserves needed to be deployed immediately. Stalin transferred three armies from the reserves, the 1st Shock Army under Lt. Gen. Vasili Kuznetsov, 10th Army under Maj. Gen. Mikhail Yefremov, and 20th Army under Maj. Gen. Andrei Vlasov to Zhukov’s Western Front. Two armies, the 24th and 60th, were deployed to defend the city.

On November 27 Major Hans Freiherr von Funck’s 7th Panzer Division seized a bridgehead on the Moscow-Volga Canal, the last natural terrain obstacle on the way to Moscow. Its leading elements stood within 20 miles Moscow’s downtown, but the German offensive power was spent. A determined counterattack by the reserve 1st Shock and 20th Armies drove the Germans back.

Soviet combat engineers blew up six dams north of Moscow to hamper German progress. The resulting flooding inundated the surrounding low-lying terrain. A wall of water up to eight feet high and 30 miles wide flooded some villages, drowning residents who had not been warned because of the desire not to jeopardize security.

In the south Guderian renewed the offensive on November 18 by attempting to bypass Tula toward Kashira; however, the exhausted Germans were making slow progress, at times barely five miles a day, in the face of constant Soviet counterattacks. By November 27 Guderian’s offensive petered out and the threat to Moscow from the south was permanently eliminated. “The troops were no longer strong enough to capture Moscow and I therefore decided with a heavy heart, on the evening of December 5, to break off our fruitless attack and withdraw to a previously selected and relatively short line which I hope I shall be able to hold with what is left of my forces,” Guderian wrote about the situation.

Having encountered strong resistance north and south of Moscow, Army Group Center launched a frontal attack on Moscow with the 4th Field Army on December 1. The Germans fought their way east along the Smolensk-Moscow highway. The German attack, supported by a small number of tanks, ran into well-prepared positions of the Soviet 1st Guards Motor Rifle Divisions. Counterattacked in the flanks and unable to break through frontally, the German offensive stalled. On December 2 the 1st Shock and 20th Armies began steadily pushing back the Germans. The 20th Army in particular achieved such success at the village of Krasnaya Polyana, its commander, Lt. Gen. Andrey Vlasov, became known as the Savior of Moscow among the Russian troops.

At the tip of the German advance was the 638th Infantry Regiment, a unit composed of French volunteers and Russian emigrants. Unlike the Frenchmen led by Napoleon during his invasion in 1812, the men of the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism did not reach Moscow, coming only within 20 miles of the Kremlin.

Lacking proper winter clothing, German troops suffered severely as the temperatures plummeted. Since German war planners had intended to defeat the Soviet Union by wintertime, the Wehrmacht had only manufactured enough winter clothing to supply those divisions that were to remain in Russia on occupation duty.

In some German units the losses from sickness and frostbite exceeded those from combat. To further exacerbate the plight of German frontline soldiers, the delivery of warm clothing was pilfered by the rear-echelon troops and only a small amount reached the front lines. To make up the shortfall, German soldiers turned to looting warm clothing from the Russian population. Freezing German soldiers near the front lines expelled Russian civilians from their homes.

Taking advantage of the German vulnerability, the Soviets parachuted saboteurs and commandos behind enemy lines with orders to burn homes and barns that the Germans used for shelter from the freezing temperatures. Their efforts frequently doomed their own citizens to a cold death as well. There were instances when local residents, in an effort to protect their homes, would capture the arsonists and turn them over to the Germans.

The Soviet high command ordered a massive counteroffensive in early December in an effort to relieve pressure on Moscow. Although German intelligence knew of the Red Army reserves staging to the east of Moscow, the strength of the Soviet attack shocked the Germans.

As early as September, Stavka had been steadily shifting the bulk of its divisions from the Far East Military District to the Moscow theater. Red Army divisions from Siberia, fully mobilized and held in readiness since June, formed the majority of Soviet strategic reserves. The front-ine forces of the Kalinin, Western, and Southwestern Fronts, combined with 58 divisions of the strategic reserves, numbered 1.1 million men, slightly more than the Germans facing them.

The units of the Kalinin Front switched to the offensive on December 5. They were followed the next day by units of the Western and Southwestern Fronts. At the start of the counterattack, the majority of fresh reserve divisions were distributed among the armies of the Western Front. This meant that the Kalinin and Southwestern Fronts had to carry on understrength and exhausted during the December fighting.

After several days of heavy positional fighting, Soviet forces began to penetrate German positions up to 10 miles in some places. Quickly committing reserves to exploit even the minor breakthroughs, the Red Army maintained pressure against both the flanks and rear of those German units still defending their positions. Two cavalry corps and one mounted mechanized group were sent to exploit the gaps and conduct raids behind German lines. Faced with a slowly crumbling front line, the Germans slowly began to fall back to avoid encirclement.

Faced with alarming reports, on December 8 Hitler reluctantly signed Directive No. 39, ordering the Wehrmacht to go on the defensive along the whole front. In some places German commanders pulled back to eliminate bulges in the front line. The shortening of lines occasionally resulted in the creation of reserves. On December 14 Halder and Gunther von Kluge, the commander of the 4th Field Army, gave permission for a limited withdrawal west of the Oka River without first seeking Hitler’s approval. When Hitler learned of this he was irate. He rescinded the order six days later, reminding his generals that they were to defend every inch of hard-won ground.

Enraged with the failure of Operation Typhoon, Hitler needed scapegoats and began a wholesale dismissal of senior commanders. On December 19, Hitler dismissed von Brauchitsch for health reasons and assumed the supreme command himself. Brauchitsch, whose health actually was declining since he had suffered a heart attack in November, was removed to the officer reserve where he remained inactive for the duration of the war.

By the end of December, dozens of generals were relieved of duty. One of these officers was Guderian, who languished in the officer reserve until 1943. For retreating without orders, General Erich Hoepner, commander of Panzer Group 4, was cashiered in January 1942.

The retreating Germans fought fiercely and the Red Army had to fight its way through the German defenses. Despite its battlefield losses, Army Group Center remained a potent and dangerous battle force. Indeed, Soviet casualties mounted to the point when the Moscow counteroffensive ground to a halt in the first week of January 1942.

Historians still debate the losses sustained by the opposing sides during Operation Typhoon and the Soviet counteroffensive. The start of the Battle of Moscow is commonly considered to be September 30, 1941. But there are still debates about the date of the end of the giant battle. Western sources typically consider the first week of January 1942 as the end of the Battle of Moscow; in contrast, many Russian sources include the Rzhev operation that followed, which began on January 8, 1942, and ended on March 3, 1942, as part of the battle. Soviet casualties numbered 658,279 for the defensive phase and an additional 370,955 until the end of the counteroffensive on January 7, 1942. In addition, the Soviets lost 4,000 tanks and 1,000 aircraft. During the same period, German casualties amounted to 460,000 men as well as 600 tanks and 800 aircraft.

By the end of the Soviet counteroffensive, the Red Army had advanced up to 150 miles in some places. The whole of the Moscow and Tula regions, as well as large parts of Kalinin and the Smolensk regions, were cleared of Germans and the threat to the capital was permanently eliminated. But the Red Army was not able to defeat Army Group Center. If it had been able to do so, the war on the Eastern Front might have ended in 1942. Believing they had captured the strategic initiative, the Soviet leadership launched several ill-prepared offensives in the first half of 1942. Although suffering tremendous losses that year, the Soviet Union was by that time fully engaged in the war of attrition, a contest that Germany could not possibly win.

Originally Published November 22, 2019.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia.

The UN chief on Monday extended his condolences to the families of those who died in a landslide, which struck the Japanese coastal city of Atami in Shizuoka Prefecture, over the weekend.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

“You did a damn fine job there,” he said. “No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.”

Key Point: Ozawa had the majority of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fighting fleet under his command at the time, but his force of approximately 90 ships and submarines was still considerably smaller than the U.S. Navy’s 129 ships and submarines. He also commanded 450 carrier-based aircraft that would coordinate with 300 ground-based aircraft in the Marianas.

The Philippine Sea encompasses two million square miles of the western part of the Pacific Ocean. It is bounded by the Philippine Islands on the west, the Mariana Islands on the east, the Caroline Islands to the south, and the Japanese Islands to the north. In the summer of 1944 it was the battleground of two great carrier strike forces. One of these belonged to Japanese Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa. The other belonged to U.S. Admiral Raymond Spruance, and its carriers were under the tactical command of Marc Mitscher. Ozawa had explicit orders to halt the steady advance of the U.S. 5th Fleet, to which Mitscher’s carriers belonged, across the vast Pacific Ocean toward Japan.

Ozawa had the majority of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s fighting fleet under his command at the time, but his force of approximately 90 ships and submarines was still considerably smaller than the U.S. Navy’s 129 ships and submarines. He also commanded 450 carrier-based aircraft that would coordinate with 300 ground-based aircraft in the Marianas.

Ozawa’s strike force steamed east in two groups. The vanguard, comprising three small carriers, four battleships, and other vessels, plowed through the Philippine Sea 100 miles ahead of the main group, which was composed of six large carriers, a battleship, and a wide array of supporting vessels.

Ozawa’s strategy was simple. His vanguard would serve as a decoy to lure the U.S. carrier aircraft while the aircraft from the main group, reinforced with land-based aircraft in the Marianas, inflicted heavy damage in multiple attacks.

Ozawa had no intention of letting Mitscher land the first blow. Japanese carrier aircraft had greater range than U.S. carrier aircraft, and Ozawa planned to make the most of his advantage. In addition, Ozawa would be able to launch his aircraft into the wind. The U.S. carriers would have to turn around and sail away from the Japanese fleet to launch their aircraft into the wind.

The Trap Flops for Ozawa

What Ozawa did not know was that even before he launched his aircraft on June 19, Mitscher had derailed his plan by knocking out the Japanese ground-based aircraft in the Marianas more than a week earlier. Beginning on June 11, Mitscher had sent his aircraft against Japanese air bases on the islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian in the Marianas. Sweeps in the days afterward pummeled the targets repeatedly to ensure aircraft were destroyed and airstrips too damaged to use. When the battle did start, Mitscher would enjoy a two to one advantage in aircraft. Rather than Mitscher sailing into a trap, it was Ozawa who was sailing into one.

Following the American defeat at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. Navy had moved decisively toward establishing the world’s first carrier-centered navy, a force that would play a deciding part in the Allied victory at Midway in June 1942.

In revenge for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, U.S. carrier aircraft struck back in the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. The Japanese failure to win a decisive victory in the Coral Sea, coupled with their loss at Midway, only strengthened the Japanese dependence on the strategy of a defensive decisive victory.

Uncertainty Grows for the Japanese High Command

Meanwhile at Midway, Spruance, who had no earlier experience with carrier-launched aircraft battles, commanded Task Force 16, including the carriers Enterprise and Mitscher’s Hornet. Despite his inexperience, he was able to oversee an American victory, which included the sinking of four Japanese carriers.

The Americans leapfrogged their way steadily north through the South Pacific, and the Japanese worked to build up their navy, waiting and watching for an opportunity for kantai kessen, the battle they believed would lead to the destruction of American naval power and decide the rest of the war. That opportunity, they would finally decide, had come in June 1944 in the Philippine Sea.

By 1944, however, the Japanese high command feared its ability to fight and win such a kantai kessen battle was slipping away. Imperial Navy aircrews had suffered serious losses, especially of skilled pilots at Coral Sea, Midway, and during the Solomon Islands campaigns. These were losses they could not easily replace, while the United States could easily replace its losses.

By the summer of 1944, the Americans had worked their way north sufficiently that they were preparing to invade the Mariana Islands. The Marianas, situated 700 miles south of the Japanese home islands, controlled the sea lanes to Japan. The capture of the islands would give the United States control of these sea lanes and would also put the U.S. Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers within striking distance of the Japanese home islands. Japan had to prevent the loss of the Marianas and stop the American advance north.

Mitscher’s Task Force 58

Still looking for the decisive victory that might end the war in the Pacific, the Japanese began eyeing Mitscher’s Task Force 58. The task force comprised five attack groups, each composed of three or four carriers and supporting ships. The ships of each attack group sailed in a circle formation with the carriers in the center and the supporting ships sailing close to the carriers so they could add their antiaircraft fire to that of the carriers and help ward off any attacking aircraft. When under attack by torpedo aircraft, the task group would turn toward the oncoming aircraft to limit attack angles. In addition, the carriers would not take evasive action when under attack, which allowed more stable platforms for the antiaircraft fire of all the ships in the task group. Mitscher had introduced many of these tactics.

In June 1944, Task Force 58 was part of Spruance’s 5th Fleet. The ships at sea were designated Task Force 58 under Spruance and Task Force 38 under Admiral William Halsey. The six-month name changes and apparent shifting of personnel in this two-platoon system had some benefit in confusing the Japanese, who at times were unsure as to the actual size of the American force.

Admiral Mineichi Koga, commander of the Combined Japanese Fleet, had been killed in March 1944 when his plane crashed in a typhoon. He was replaced with Admiral Soemu Toyoda, a torpedo and naval artillery expert who had been opposed to war with the United States, a war he had considered unwinnable. Despite this belief, Toyoda continued to develop the attack plans that Koga had been working on, plans aimed at a decisive victory.

The Japanese Fleet Rendezvous in the Philippine Sea

On June 11, Mitscher’s carriers launched their first air strikes on the Marianas, and Toyoda became aware that the showdown in the Central Pacific was at hand. Japan had to save Saipan, and the only possible defense, he believed, was to sink the U.S. 5th Fleet that was covering the landing.

The Japanese fleet Ozawa commanded consisted of three large carriers (Taiho, Shokaku, and Zuikaku), two converted carriers (Junyo and Hiyo), and four light carriers (Ryuho, Chitose, Chiyoda, and Zuiho). Ozawa’s fleet also included five battleships (Yamato, Musashi, Kongo, Haruna, and Nagato), 13 heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, 27 destroyers, six oilers, and 24 submarines. Ozawa commanded from aboard the Taiho, which was the first Japanese carrier to have been built with an armor-plated flight deck, which was designed to withstand bomb hits.

The commanders in the U.S. 5th Fleet had 956 carrier-based planes available to them. In addition, Ozawa’a pilots only had about 25 percent of the training and experience the American pilots had, and he was working with inferior equipment. His ships had antiaircraft guns, for example, but lacked the new proximity fuses, which provided a more sophisticated triggering mechanism than the common contact fuses or timed fuses did, as well as good radar.

The Japanese fleet rendezvoused June 16 in the western part of the Philippine Sea. Japanese aircraft did have a superior range at that time, though, which allowed them to engage the American carriers beyond the range of American aircraft. They could attack at 300 miles and could search a radius of 560 miles, while the American Hellcat fighters were limited to an attack range of 200 miles and a search range of 325 miles. Additionally, with their island bases in the area, the Japanese believed their aircraft could attack the U.S. fleet and then land on the island airfields. They could thus shuttle between the islands and the attack, and the U.S. fleet would be receiving punishment with only a limited ability to respond.

A Major Battle on the Horizon…

The American air raids on the Marianas continued through June 15, and U.S. ships began an additional bombardment of the islands. On June 15, three divisions of American troops, two Marine divisions and one Army division, went ashore on Saipan, and Toyoda committed nearly the entire Japanese Navy to a counterattack. Toyoda wired Ozawa that he was to attack the Americans and annihilate their fleet. “The rise and fall of Imperial Japan depends on this one battle,” Toyoda wrote.

The U.S. submarines Flying Fish and Seahorse sighted the Japanese fleet near the Philippines on June 15. The Japanese ships did not finish refueling until two days later. Based on those sightings, Spruance quickly decided a major battle was at hand. He ordered Mitscher’s Task Force 58, which had sent two of its carrier task groups north to intercept aircraft reinforcements from Japan, to reform and move west of Saipan into the Philippine Sea. Mitscher was aboard his flagship, the carrier Lexington, which Tokyo Rose would erroneously report on at least two occasions to have been sunk. Spruance was aboard the heavy cruiser Indianapolis.

Task Force 58 comprised five attack groups. Deployed in front of the carriers to act as an antiaircraft screen was the battle group of Vice Admiral Willis Lee (Task Group 58.7), which contained seven battleships (Lee’s flagship the Washington, as well as the North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Alabama), and eight heavy cruisers (Baltimore, Boston, Canberra, Wichita, Minneapolis, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Spruance’s Indianapolis). Just north of them was the weakest of the carrier groups, Rear Admiral William K. Harrill’s Task Group 58.4. This group was composed of only one fleet carrier (Essex) and two light carriers (Langley and Cowpens).

“Let’s Do It Properly Tomorrow”

To the east, in a line running north to south, were three additional attack groups, each containing two fleet carriers and two light carriers. This was Rear Admiral Joseph Clark’s Task Group 58.1, which consisted of the Hornet, Yorktown, Belleau Wood, and Bataan, Rear Admiral Alfred Montgomery’s Task Group 58.2 (Bunker Hill, Wasp, Cabot, and Monterey), and Rear Admiral John W. Reeves’s Task Group 58.3 (Enterprise, Lexington, San Jacinto, and Princeton). These ships were supported by 13 light cruisers, 58 destroyers, and 28 submarines. The attack groups were deployed 12 to 15 miles apart.

Eight older battleships along with smaller escort carriers under the command of Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf remained near Saipan to protect the invasion fleet and provide air support for the landings.

On the afternoon of June 18, search planes sent out from the Japanese fleet located the American task force, and Rear Admiral Sueo Obayashi, commander of three of the Japanese carriers, immediately launched fighters. He quickly received a message from Ozawa, however, recalling the fighters. “Let’s do it properly tomorrow,” Ozawa wrote.

Later that night, the Americans also detected the Japanese ships moving toward them. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, alerted Spruance that a Japanese vessel had broken radio silence and a message apparently sent by Ozawa to his land-based air forces on Guam had been intercepted. A fix obtained on that message placed the Japanese some 355 miles west-southwest of Task Force 58. Mitscher requested permission from Spruance to move Task Force 58 west during the night, which would by dawn put it in position to attack the approaching Japanese fleet. “We knew we were going to have hell slugged out of us in the morning [and] we knew we couldn’t reach them,” Captain Arleigh Burke, a member of Mitscher’s staff, said later when discussing that request.

But after considerable consideration, Spruance denied Mitscher permission to make the move. “If we were doing something so important that we were attracting the enemy to us, we could afford to let him come and take care of him when he arrived,” Spruance said.

Carrier Commanders Spruance & Mitscher

This decision was far different from decisions Spruance had made at Midway. There he had advocated immediately attacking the enemy even before his own strike force was fully assembled with the intent of neutralizing the Japanese carriers before they could launch their planes, an action that he then considered the key to the survival of his carriers. He would also take considerable criticism for missing what some were to consider a chance to destroy the Japanese fleet.

Spruance’s decision to deny Mitscher’s request was influenced by orders from Nimitz, who had made it clear that the protection of the Marianas invasion was the primary mission of Task Force 58.

Spruance was concerned that the Japanese move could be an attempt to draw his ships away from the Marianas so a Japanese attack force could then slip behind it, overwhelm Oldendorf’s force, and destroy the landing fleet. Locating and destroying the Japanese fleet was not his primary objective, and he was unwilling to allow the main strike force of the Pacific Fleet to be drawn westward, away from the amphibious forces.

Spruance also may have been influenced by Japanese documents that had been captured in March and described just such a proposed plan: drawing American ships that were supporting an invasion away from an island and then sweeping in behind the fleet to destroy the invading force.

Spruance and Mitscher were different commanders. Though now commanding carriers, Spruance was still at heart a battleship man and, like most of the Imperial Japanese Navy establishment, he dreamed of a ship-to-ship confrontation. As the Battle of the Philippine Sea loomed, Spruance early on considered sending his fast battleships out to confront Ozawa in a night action and had only dropped the idea when his battleship commander, Admiral Lee, deferred. Lee had seen enough of night actions at Guadalcanal and the Solomons.

As for Mitscher, he was a carrier man. He sat on the bridge of his flagship watching the flight deck as planes were launched and could be seen using body language to help them off. He had graduated from the Naval Academy in 1910 and had taken an early interest in aviation, requesting a transfer to aeronautics in his last year as a midshipman. The request was denied, and he served on the destroyers Whipple and Stewart before being stationed on the armored cruiser North Carolina, which was being used as an experimental launching platform for aircraft. Mitscher trained as a pilot and became one of the first U.S. naval aviators on June 2, 1916.

As information about the Japanese buildup came in and the upcoming battle loomed, Mitscher said that what was coming “might be a hell of a battle for a while,” but added that he believed the task force could win it.

Search Planes At Dawn on June 19

At dawn on June 18, Task Force 58 launched search aircraft, combat air patrols, and antisubmarine patrols and then turned the fleet west to gain maneuvering room away from the islands. The Japanese also launched search patrols early in the day. Those planes pinpointed the American position, and one of the Japanese planes, after locating the task force, attacked one of its destroyers. The attacking Japanese plane was shot down.

At dawn on June 19, Ozawa again launched search planes and located the American ships southwest of Saipan. He then launched 71 aircraft from his carriers, which were followed a short time later by another 128 planes.

Among the U.S. fighters that would be sent up to confront them were a large number of F6F Hellcats, a Grumman aircraft that had been put into service in early 1942, eventually replacing the F4F Wildcat. The Hellcat had been engineered specifically to confront Japanese fighters when the Americans recovered an intact Zero during the fighting in the Aleutian Islands in 1942 and were able to engineer a fighter to succeed against it in combat. The Hellcat could outclimb and outdrive the Japanese Zero and was heavily armed. In addition, its pilot was protected by heavy armor plating, self-sealing fuel tanks, and a bulletproof windshield, which made it popular with the Navy pilots.

The American pilots who would meet the Japanese also had at least two years of training and 300 hours of flying experience as opposed to the Japanese pilots, who had at most six months of training and a few flying hours. They were faint copies of the pilots who had flown against the American base at Pearl Harbor and the American fleet at Midway.

A Great Fight In The Sky and In The Water

At 10 am, radar aboard the American ships picked up the first wave of Japanese attackers. American fighters that had been sent to raid Guam were called back to the fleet, and at 10:23 am Mitscher ordered Task Force 58 to turn into the wind. All available fighters were sent up to await the Japanese. He then put his bomber aircraft aloft to orbit open waters to the east to avoid the danger of a Japanese bomb strike into a hangar deck full of aircraft.

The approaching Japanese planes were first spotted by a group of 12 Hellcats from the Belleau Wood about 72 miles out from the American fleet where they had paused to regroup. The Belleau Wood planes tore into the Japanese planes there and were soon joined by other American fighter groups. Twenty-five of the Japanese planes were quickly knocked out of the sky, and then 16 more.

As the Japanese and American fighters dove at each other, machine guns blazing, 70 miles west of the American fleet, a few of the Japanese planes were able to break away and work their way through to the American ships. They attacked the picket destroyers Yarnall and Stockham, causing only a small amount of damage. But one Japanese bomber was able to get through the American defenses and scored a direct hit on the main deck of the battleship South Dakota. More than 50 of her crew were killed or injured, but the ship remained operational.

Only one Hellcat was lost in the fighting. At 11:07 am, radar detected a second wave of 107 Japanese aircraft approaching. American fighters met this attacking group while it was still 60 miles out, and 70 of the attackers were shot down before they reached the task force. Of those that did get through, six attacked the American fleet, nearly hitting two of the carriers and causing some casualties before four of that six were brought down. A small group of torpedo planes also attacked the carrier Enterprise and the light carrier Princeton, but all were shot down. Altogether, 97 of those 107 attacking Japanese aircraft were destroyed.

“Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”

A third attack consisting of 47 Japanese aircraft came at the American ships at about 1 pm. Forty U.S. fighters intercepted the attack group 50 miles out and shot down seven of the Japanese planes. A few again broke through defenses to attack the American ships but caused little or no damage. The 40 remaining Japanese aircraft fled the scene.

The Japanese fleet had also launched an additional attack, but somehow those planes had been given incorrect coordinates for the location of the American fleet and were originally unable to find the ships. Eighteen of those aircraft did finally stumble on some of the American ships as they were heading back to Guam and attacked. U.S. fighters shot down half of them while the remaining planes were able to attack the Wasp and Bunker Hill but failed to score any hits. Eight of these Japanese planes were also shot down. Meanwhile, the remains of this aborted attack force were intercepted by 27 American Hellcats as they were landing on Guam and 30 more were shot down. Nineteen others were damaged beyond repair.

“Hell, this is like an old-time turkey shoot,” said Lexington Commander Paul Buie,

creating the nickname, “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” which would later be pinned on the battle by the men who were fighting it.

The Japanese had lost 346 aircraft during the day’s fighting, while the Americans had lost 15 and, aside from the casualties on the South Dakota, had suffered only minor damage to their ships.

Submarines In The Water

The pilot with the highest score of the day was Captain David McCampbell of the Essex, who would go on to become the U.S. Navy ’s all-time leading ace with 34 confirmed kills during the war and would win the Medal of Honor for his actions in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. On June 19, he had downed five Japanese D4Y “Judy” carrier-based dive bombers. He would also notch two Zero fighters later in the day during an afternoon strike on Guam.

Lieutenant Alex Vraciu of the Lexington, the top-ranked Navy ace at the time with 12 victories, downed six Judys of the second wave in about eight minutes, and Ensign Wilbur “Spider” Webb, a recent transfer to fighters from bombers, attacked a flight of Aichi dive bombers over Guam, also downing six. Webb returned safely to the carrier Hornet, but the gunners aboard the Japanese bombers had shot his plane so full of holes that it was judged a total loss.

The destruction wrought in the air was not the only damage done to the Japanese that day. While the air battle was taking place, another battle was being fought above and below the surface of the sea.

At 8 am that day the submarine Albacore sighted a Japanese carrier group and began maneuvering to attack. The submarine’s commander, Lt. Cmdr. James W. Blanchard, selected the closest carrier to his position as his target. That carrier happened to be Admiral Ozawa’s flagship, the Taiho, the newest carrier in the Japanese fleet. As Blanchard gained position and prepared to fire, however, the Albacore’s fire-control computer failed, and he was forced to fire manually. Blanchard fired all six torpedoes in a single spread. Four veered off target. One of the remaining two was spotted heading for the Taiho by Japanese Warrant Officer Akio Komatsu, who had just taken off from the carrier. Without hesitation, Komatsu jammed his stick and intentionally dove his plane in front of the torpedo, detonating it and saving the carrier. But the remaining torpedo of the six struck the Taiho on its starboard side, rupturing two aviation fuel tanks. The Albacore was able to escape the ensuing depth charge attack with only minor damage.

Initially, the Taiho seemed to have suffered only slight damage, but gasoline vapors from the damaged fuel tanks soon began to leak into the hangar decks, creating a serious situation on the ship.

Meanwhile, a second American submarine, the Cavalla, attacked the carrier Shokaku, which was a veteran of the fighting at Pearl Harbor and the Coral Sea. At about noon, the Cavalla fired on the Japanese ship, hitting her with three torpedoes and badly damaging her. One torpedo had hit the forward aviation fuel tanks, and aircraft that had just landed and were being refueled exploded into flames. Ammunition, exploding bombs, and burning fuel added to the chaos. The order to abandon Shokaku had just been given when an explosion on her hangar deck initiated a series of secondary explosions that blew the ship apart. She rolled on her side and sank taking 887 officers and sailors and 376 members of the 601st Naval Air Group to the bottom with her. There were 570 survivors, including the carrier’s commanding officer, Captain Hiroshi Matsubara.

Ozawa Retires Northwest to Refuel

The destroyer Urakaze made several attempts to destroy the submarine, but the Cavalla escaped with relatively minor damage. However, she did get a scare. Cavalla’s main induction line, which brought air into the engines when she was on the surface, had become flooded during the initial depth charge attack, which made the submarine very heavy. When diving to avoid the attack of the Urakaze, the additional weight took Cavalla nearly 100 feet below her maximum test depth. “We hoped the safety factor would keep the hull from imploding,” said a crewmember. It did.

Three destroyers continued to hunt the Cavalla, dropping 106 depth charges, but she was able to slip away. Meanwhile, aboard the Taiho an inexperienced damage control officer ordered that the ship’s ventilation system be operated at full blast to clear the growing fumes. Instead of clearing the air, however, the action allowed the gasoline vapors to spread throughout the ship. At about 2:30 am, those fumes were ignited by an electric generator on the hangar deck, and a series of large explosions followed. Taiho had become a floating bomb. Ozawa and his staff quickly transferred to the nearby Zuikaku, and shortly afterward the Taiho sank, taking down 1,650 of her 2,150 officers and sailors.

As darkness fell, Ozawa retired to the northwest to refuel, intending to attack again in the morning. He had received several erroneous reports of heavy damage done to the American ships and was also under the impression that many of his missing aircraft had landed in the Marianas. During the night Task Force 58 began to move west in order to be closer to the Japanese when dawn came.

For the Americans, the Worst Was Yet to Come…

As the sun finally edged over the horizon, American search planes were sent out but were unable to locate the enemy. A later search also failed to make contact. But, finally, at 3:40 pm an American search plane located the Japanese fleet 275 miles away from the task force, near the limit of the American fighters’ range. That range was advertised at 250 miles, one aviation commander said, “But with planning and luck we could get to 300.” In addition, because of the time of day that the Japanese ships had been finally spotted, any planes that took off from the American carriers would have to strike in the fading light of dusk and find their way back to the American carriers and land in the dark, something that was new to most of the American pilots. Mitscher, prodded by Nimitz in Hawaii, nonetheless opted to launch an all-out attack.

When he became aware of the American attack, Ozawa began pulling his ships back, hoping to get them out of the American planes’ range before they could close the gap. Aboard the American ships, a another message, perhaps a result of Ozawa’s retreat, arrived indicating the Japanese fleet was actually 60 miles farther out than previously believed. That put the Japanese at 335 miles, beyond even the Americans’ lucky range of 300 miles. Based on that information, further launches were cancelled, but the planes already launched were allowed to continue. Of these 240 planes, 14 returned to their carriers for various reasons. Of the remaining 226 planes, 95 were Hellcat fighters, 54 were Avenger torpedo bombers (only a few carrying torpedoes, the rest four 500-pound bombs), and 76 were Curtiss Helldivers and Douglas Dauntless dive bombers.

As the American planes approached the Japanese fleet, Ozawa was able to put up only 75 planes to protect his ships, and the American planes quickly overwhelmed these fighters. They swept through the Japanese defenses and attacked the fleet, quickly causing serious damage to several oilers and then hitting the carrier Hiyo, which was soon ablaze after leaking aviation fuel exploded. An abandon ship order was sounded, and she went down. Two hundred-fifty of the Hiyo crew were killed; Japanese destroyers in the area rescued the remaining 1,000 survivors.

Some of the American planes also bombed the large carrier Zuikaku and the light carrier Chiyoda, both of which were set ablaze, and heavily damaged the battleship Haruna and the heavy cruiser Maya. The converted carrier Junyo was also hit. Sixty-five Japanese planes were downed in the fighting as were 20 of the American aircraft. But for the Americans the worst was yet to come.

After the strike, which ended at about 6:45 pm, many of the American planes were already running low on fuel, and some had suffered enough battle damage that they were forced to ditch on their way back to their carriers. Darkness was falling. Despite the danger of submarine attacks on his ships, Mitscher fully illuminated his carriers and had his destroyers’ fire star shells to aid the pilots in landing.

“The effect on the pilots left behind was magnetic,” said Lt. Cmdr. Robert Winston. “They stood open-mouthed at the sheer audacity of asking the Japs to come and get us. Our pilots were not expendable.”

Sixty of the returning aircraft were still lost, many of them crashing into the sea as they ran out of fuel, but the majority of the flyers, 38 of the downed men, were eventually rescued.

Meanwhile, Admiral Ozawa received orders from Toyoda to cease fighting and withdraw from the area. U.S. forces briefly gave chase, but by June 21 the Japanese planes were out of range. The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot was over.

A Resounding American Victory

The Battle of the Philippine Sea had been a resounding American victory. The Japanese lost three carriers and two oilers sunk and had almost all of their aircraft destroyed. Six other ships had been damaged and an estimated 2,987 Japanese combatants killed. The Americans had one battleship damaged and 123 aircraft destroyed. The task force lost 29 airmen and another 31 men on the ships.

The Japanese losses were irreplaceable. They had spent the better part of a year building up their carrier strike force, and the United States had destroyed 90 percent of it in the fighting. The Japanese only had enough pilots left to form the air group for one of their light carriers, and during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 they used their carriers only as decoys.

The battle also added to the growing reputation of the American F6F Hellcat. With its powerful engine, greater speed, and firepower it had proved itself deadly, greatly outclassing the A6M Zero.

Spruance’s conservative battle plan, while not destroying all of the Japanese aircraft carriers, had resulted in an overwhelming American victory. It had severely weakened Japanese naval aviation forces by killing most of the remaining trained enemy pilots and destroying their last reserves of naval aircraft. Despite the lopsided American victory, though, many officers, particularly aviators, criticized Spruance for his decision to fight the battle cautiously rather than exploit his superior forces and intelligence more aggressively.

Spruance’s critics argued that he had squandered an opportunity to destroy the entire Japanese fleet. Admiral John Towers, a naval aviation pioneer and deputy commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, demanded that Spruance be relieved. The request was denied by Nimitz. Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, commander of the amphibious force during the Pacific campaign, and the Navy’s most senior commander, Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, joined Nimitz in supporting Spruance. Despite what some called the chance of the century, Spruance had done what Nimitz had ordered him to do: he had remained and protected the invasion of Saipan.

A month after the Battle of the Philippine Sea, King and Nimitz visited Spruance at Saipan. During that meeting, King made a point of telling Spruance of his support. “You did a damn fine job there,” he said. “No matter what other people tell you, your decision was correct.”

The Battle of the Philippine Sea was the last great contest between carrier strike forces ever fought. It was a victory that, among other things, brought the American B-29 within striking distance of the Japanese home islands, and in so doing shortened the war.

Originally Published October 9, 2018.

This article originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Belarus has witnessed an unprecedented human rights crisis over the past year, the independent expert appointed to monitor the country said on Monday, calling on authorities to immediately end their policy of repression and fully respect the legitimate aspirations of their people.

La victoire, en Coupe du monde de football, de l'équipe de France a provoqué une sorte de mini-séisme sociologique. Jusqu'alors relativement distante à l'égard du phénomène football, la société française, toutes catégories sociales confondues, s'est soudain passionnée pour les victoires de son équipe (...) / Audiovisuel, Sport - 1998/08

Warfare History Network

Security,

Bombers, especially, were crucially important aircraft. 

Key Point: The Japanese air raid consisted of a few medium bombers making several passes at night.

Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber crews of the U.S. 11th Bombardment Group spent the first three months of 1943 organizing on Hawaiian airfields and flying practice and patrol missions around the islands. By mid-April, with no strike missions and no contact with the enemy, the bomber crews were restless. But the morning of April 17 had a different feel—electric.

The group’s officers were still in a closed-door briefing while rumors buzzed about a bombing mission, their first. All that remained for pilots to tell their crews was when and where. When pilot Lieutenant Joe Deasy met with his crew and gave them the particulars, it was the first time they had heard of Funafuti. Twenty-three Liberators would fly to Canton Island, a pork-chop shaped atoll 1,900 miles southwest of Oahu, refuel, and continue 740 miles farther to Funafuti in the Ellice Islands group, more than 2,600 miles from Hawaii.

“We didn’t know where Funafuti was,” B-24 gunner Sergeant Ed Hess recalled. “When we saw the map, we griped about it being halfway to Australia.”

Airfield at Funafuti

Six months before, on October 2, 1942, 11 ships of the United States Navy entered Funafuti’s lagoon and landed a Navy construction battalion. The Seabees immediately began construction of an airfield and support facilities while Marines prepared defenses and set up antiaircraft guns. To build the runway, the Seabees bulldozed thousands of coconut trees and covered arable land with hard-packed coral. The airfield was completed before the end of the year.

On the long flight to Canton, the men ate sandwiches delivered to the flight line from Kahuku’s mess hall. They used their flak jackets for pillows and stole naps in the back of the airplane. A relief tube, or “piss pipe” as crewmen called it, was built into the side of the plane just aft of the left waist window; another one was installed behind the flight deck. There was a portable toilet that most men avoided, better to wait than use the “honey bucket” and have to wash it out after landing because “if you used it, it was yours to clean,” radio operator Sergeant Herman Scearce remembered. Even the piss pipe could be a nasty problem at higher altitudes where its flow could freeze and cause a messy backup.

The Navy garrison on Canton treated its overnight guests well. The Air Corps men ate a hot meal in the Navy mess hall and slept in clean barracks with fresh bed linens. Early the next morning, 23 refueled B-24 Liberators took flight for the final leg of the trip to Funafuti, and on the afternoon of April 18 the wisps of land of the Ellice Islands came into view.

The planes approached Funafuti’s coral airstrip from the southwest. The island, shaped like a long, narrow boomerang, curved from the southwest to its thickest part in the middle, then bent back toward the northwest. Long and graceful, Funafuti was about 50 yards wide at each end, about 700 yards wide in the middle, and seven and a half miles long. Waves broke along the eastern side, the dark blue water of the Pacific just beyond and to the right as the aircraft approached.

To the left of the island, in the middle of the boomerang, was a lagoon, its calm water a beautiful shade of light blue fading to green close to shore. Coconut trees covered the island from its lower tip, nearest the approaching planes, and ended at the airfield. The white coral runway cut straight across the leading edge of the boomerang, beginning just a few feet from the ocean, and it seemed to end in the ocean on the other side.

After landing, the aircraft were parked along the runway side by side. There were no taxiways and very few revetments or bomb proofs on Funafuti to shelter parked aircraft, though there were plans to add them later. If a plane was hit during a Japanese air raid, the planes on either side were also at risk. But the airmen on Funafuti were not worried about a Japanese attack because Funafuti was just a staging base; they were not going to keep the planes there long. Besides, the briefing officer back at Kahuku made it clear that the Japanese would not know they were there.

Dogpatch Express

Early on Monday, April 19, 1943, an officer stepped front and center on Funafuti’s outdoor stage before the assembled air crews. The men sat on felled palm logs arranged in rows like seats in a theater. Behind the officer was a map, and on the bottom right of the map was Funafuti. There was another island near the upper left corner, and beside the map was a separate, large, scale drawing of the second island, Nauru.

The officer tapped his pointer on targets and visual references on the map of Nauru. He described antiaircraft gun positions and what kind of fighter interception the men would face. When he was finished, a weather officer took the stage, describing the conditions expected through each part of the flight. Next, the operations officer gave the crews critical mission details, including engine start time and order of take off. Each man mentally calculated when he needed to be at the plane in order to preflight his equipment and be ready for engine start.

After the briefing, aircrews prepared their planes for the next day’s mission. Ground crews fueled each B-24 with 2,700 gallons of gas from tank trailers towed behind Cletracs, tracked vehicles similar to bulldozers. Flight Engineer Jack Yankus and Assistant Engineer Bob Lipe confirmed the fuel level and checked engine oil levels of their B-24, Dogpatch Express. Yankus, Lipe, radioman Herman Scearce, and gunners Hess, Elmer Johnson, and Al Marston cleaned and oiled the barrels of their machine guns and loaded them with ammunition, belts of .50-caliber rounds in a repeating sequence of two armor piercing, two incendiary, and one tracer. Scearce confirmed the radios were working properly and ready to go.

Bombardier Lieutenant Shorty Schroeder oversaw the bomb loading of Dogpatch Express. Eight 500-pound general purpose bombs were loaded in the plane’s bomb bay racks from bomb trailers pulled by a truck. Most of the bombs were fused to explode on impact; some were equipped with delay fuses. Once the plane was loaded, Yankus checked the landing gear for four inches of travel in their shock-absorbing struts because less could cause the gear to fail.

Taking Off Toward Nauru

After a fitful few hours of sleep, the crew of Dogpatch Express walked to their plane. Yankus made certain the ignition switches were off, then he and Lipe pulled the propellers through, counting six propellers at each engine, two full revolutions of the Liberator’s three-bladed prop. While Scearce rechecked his radio equipment, Yankus climbed aboard and fitted the pilot and copilot parachutes into the recesses of their seats, then reported to Lieutenant Joe Deasy that the plane was ready.

On the flight deck of Dogpatch Express, Deasy and copilot Lieutenant Sam Catanzarite completed their preflight checklist as pilots and copilots aboard 22 more Liberators on Funafuti’s moonlit runway completed their own. At engine start, four 14-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-1830-43 radial engines, 1,200-horsepower each, joined the motors of the other aircraft to produce a mighty harmony unlike anything Funafuti had ever heard before.

Before his takeoff roll, Deasy opened the throttles and held the brakes until engine manifold pressures reached 25 inches of mercury. When Deasy released the brakes, Catanzarite held the throttles to the stops so they would not creep back. Yankus called out speed as Dogpatch Express accelerated, slowly at first with its full bomb load. Deasy began to apply gentle pressure, pulling the yoke back, and the heavy bomber lifted off Funafuti’s dusty coral runway.

In the predawn darkness of April 20, the B-24s took off, each loaded with 4,000 pounds of bombs. One plane developed an engine problem and turned back to Funafuti, but the remaining bombers droned on toward a midday strike against Japanese positions on Nauru.

Nauru lies 26 miles below the equator, 1,000 miles northwest of Funafuti. Oval shaped with about eight square miles of territory, it is ringed by trees and a sandy beach on its perimeter. The interior of the island is almost solid high-grade rock phosphate, essential in metal alloys and used in bomb production. Phosphate mining, refining, and shipping facilities operated by the British on Nauru before the war were shelled by a German auxiliary cruiser in 1940 and seized by the Japanese in 1942. Far flung Nauru, with the unusual distinction of being occupied by the British and attacked by both German and Japanese forces already during the war, was about to be bombed by Americans.

“Man Your Guns”

The Liberators drew closer to Nauru and more than 220 air crew and observers were wholly and irrevocably committed. There was no way to avoid whatever was to come, no place to hide. Nauru lay just beyond the horizon, the distance closing at more than three miles per minute. The American bombers would reach their target at noon, each man keenly aware that the bright, beautiful day meant Nauru’s Japanese defenders would see the bombers approach with plenty of time to prepare their reception.

Scearce recalls sitting at his radio operator’s table behind copilot Catanzarite when navigator Lieutenant Art Boone leaned toward their pilot and said, “Joe, we’re one hour out.” Scearce glanced at his pilot, and from the right and behind him, he saw Lieutenant Joe Deasy swallow and take a breath before speaking to the crew through the interphone. “We’re 60 minutes from the target, boys. Man your guns.”

Scearce and Yankus unplugged their interphone headsets and moved toward the rear as they had practiced a hundred times before. They stepped into the bomb bay, Dogpatch Express’s four massive radial engines howling in unison, much louder than they had seemed from the flight deck. Moving along the narrow catwalk and indifferent to the thousands of pounds of high explosives just inches to their right and left, waist gunners Scearce and Yankus gripped the framework of the bomb racks as they went. The vibrating metal felt cool.

After Scearce and Yankus passed, Bob Lipe took his position in the top turret, just behind the flight deck, and rotated the turret clockwise, then back, out of habit. Ed Hess settled into the nose turret. Elmer Johnson, already in the aircraft’s rear section with Al Marston, stepped back from the piss pipe and stretched himself before jacking up the belly turret with the hand pump, just enough to release its safety hooks. Johnson opened a hydraulic valve and allowed the turret to slide into the wind stream beneath the plane. He glanced back at Scearce and Yankus, smiled, and made a diving motion, hands together as if he was on the high board at the YMCA, and then opened the turret’s hatch door, stepped into the turret, and folded himself into position.

Marston moved up the sloping floor toward the twin .50s in the bomber’s tail. There was an interphone jack box at every position, and each gunner plugged in, pulled on his interphone headset, and checked the jack box to make sure the switch was set to “INTER.”

Throat microphones around their necks, Yankus and Scearce glanced down and pushed their flak jackets flat with shuffling feet, standing on them for protection against gunfire from below. They pushed their wind deflectors out, swung open their windows and latched them overhead. Already Lipe, Hess, and Johnson had reported ready. Yankus and Scearce swung their machine guns into the air stream and charged their guns with an expert pull on the handle.

“Right waist gun ready,” Scearce said. “Left waist ready,” Yankus reported, then Marston called in from the rear. Joe Deasy recalled telling his crew, “Keep your eyes open, keep the chatter down, and call ‘em when you see ‘em. Hold your fire ‘til they’re in range.”

Zeros Attack

Hess swept the nose turret side to side. Lipe kept the top turret forward, mostly, rotating through 360 degrees, first right, then to the left, as often as his stomach could handle it. Al Marston shifted his eyes up and then straight behind the plane, scanning the sky from just below the twin rudders of his bomber, wind whistling to either side. Elmer Johnson rode below the plane, almost in his own world, the expanse of the ocean thousands of feet below. Scearce searched the sky, and behind him Yankus gripped his machine gun. Back to back they shared almost identical views, a beautiful bright sky, sun directly overhead, other B-24s nearby.

Deasy’s voice broke the interphone silence, clear and steady, “Eleven o’clock, got two coming in 11 o’clock high!” Scearce heard Lipe and Hess open fire from the top and front of Dogpatch Express. He and Yankus leaned forward, trying to see, fists gripping their guns, instinctively pointed where the men were looking.

“Two o’clock high, coming down fast, be ready, top.” Lieutenant Deasy’s voice was matter-of-fact, Yankus remembered, almost calming, though the words came quickly. The top turret opened up again. The first two Japanese planes, attacking head-on, had broken off to one side of Dogpatch Express. The Liberators had been modified by the Hickam Air Depot with tail turrets mounted in the nose, surprising the Japanese fighter pilots who expected to attack the weak, glass nose of unmodified D model Liberators. After their initial head-on pass, the Mitsubishi Zero fighters attacked from other angles.

Scearce’s heart pounded like a jackhammer. He could not see the Zeros yet. The nearest B-24’s top turret and left waist gunner blazed away, their tracers leading Scearce’s eyes above Dogpatch Express’s right wing, when a blur of gray flashed beneath the wing. Scearce reacted instantly, pushing his gun barrel low, squeezing the trigger. A two-second burst and the Zero was gone before Scearce heard its 14-cylinder Nakajima Sakae 12 engine scream past. Elmer Johnson in the belly turret then saw the Zero and squeezed off a burst.

Up top, Lipe spoke clearly, a nervous edge in his voice. “One, two more at two o’clock high  … out of the sun again!”

“Eight o’clock low, coming up! Another one at five o’clock,” Yankus and then Johnson called. Each man was part of a whole, a working team, and part of their machine. Dogpatch Express was now fully engaged, every gun hammering at the attacking fighters in turn. The .50-caliber machine guns pounded like angry fists beating hard and fast on a steel door. Hot, spent brass and gun belt links falling to the floor clinked like glass breaking around the waist gunner’s feet.

“We were all scared,” Scearce recalls. “We all prayed selfish prayers…God, just get me back on the ground again.”

“This is a Long Way From Gunnery School”

Scearce joined Johnson and Lipe, five .50-caliber machine guns blazing at a single Zero fighter, tracers spitting toward the Japanese plane in burning white lines. Lipe, in the top turret, sent a stream of gunfire into the belly of the Zero as it streaked overhead. From the left waist window, Jack Yankus saw Lipe’s tracers drill the unprotected bottom of the enemy plane. He watched it pitch forward, nose down, and lost sight of it as it plummeted straight down. A few seconds of strained quiet followed  while the men scanned the sky.

Scearce suddenly spotted a Zero “four o’clock high” and called out the position. Lipe swung around in his electrically powered turret. Scearce bent low, aiming high, waiting for the range to be right when Lipe opened up. Johnson swung left and strained to see the Zero. Scearce saw muzzle flashes through the Zero’s propeller; its twin guns seemed to be shooting straight at him. Squeezing the trigger, Scearce swung his gun down as the Zero passed. He saw tracers run through the Zero’s cowling and remembered that a .50-caliber bullet could knock a cylinder head off a Zero’s engine.

Nose gunner Ed Hess gave a quick burst from up front, swinging through 10, then nine o’clock as the fighter passed, and then it was quiet again. Scearce kicked some brass away from his feet, took a deep breath, and thought, “This is a long way from gunnery school.”

As the Zeros moved off, the crew was sure the other bombers were catching hell behind them. The twin 7.7mm machine guns of the Zero fighters were supplemented by menacing 20mm cannon mounted in each wing. The explosive round from the 20mm gun weighed more than a quarter of a pound, and hits by the Zero’s cannon could be devastating.

However, the Zero’s impressive armament belied the nimble fighter’s weaknesses. The Japanese plane sacrificed the added weight of self-sealing fuel tanks and armor protection in favor of speed and agility, qualities that could serve the Zero well in combat with other fighters. As an interceptor of B-24 Liberators, however, with their armor protection, self-sealing fuel tanks, and 10 .50-caliber guns, the Zero was vulnerable, even fragile. Zero pilots pressing home an attack against a Liberator needed nerves of steel.

Dogpatch Express Bombing Run

Aboard Dogpatch Express, bombardier Lieutenant Shorty Schroeder was ready to take control of the plane for the bomb run, his bomb sight connected to the flight controls. The bombardier aimed his entire aircraft through the bomb sight.

The Japanese fighter pilots changed tactics as the bombers readied for their bomb runs, and the flak batteries on the ground below began sending their shells skyward. Nine Zeros circled at a distance, chasing one another’s tails in an oval, a racetrack pattern that advanced as the bombers sped forward. The Zeros fired their guns each time the circuit brought them to face the American bombers, but with his own plane’s right wing and engines between him and the enemy fighters Scearce could only watch, a white flash each time, a blink, and hope the streams of Japanese bullets missed.

Antiaircraft gunners now took their turn. Flak bursts filled the sky ahead, inky dark puffs drifting closer as the bombers approached. In the distance, a single Japanese plane idled along, out of range of the Liberators’ guns, holding the same altitude as the American planes, reporting it to the ground batteries below. The B-24s rushed unalterably, purposefully ahead.

There was no dodging the flak. Dogpatch Express held 7,500 feet altitude during the bomb run, level, steady, with no deviation from course. This was a bomber at its most vulnerable during a strike mission, 45 seconds that lasted forever, 45 seconds, it seemed, before the crew could breathe again. Flak bursts, like sinister potholes in the sky, caused the plane to shake and bounce as they exploded. Scearce was amazed anything flew through it. Spent flak pelted the plane like hail on a tin roof.

“We wanted to be small, very small,” Deasy remembered. They wanted the bomb run to end, the bombs to be away, but they also wanted the bombs to be on target. They did not want their trip to be wasted, did not want to have to do it again. Scearce noticed his knuckles, ghost white on the grips, and he forced himself to flex his hands as he watched the sky.

“Bombs Away!”

Behind the flight deck of Dogpatch Express there suddenly was a loud thump and a metallic clang, followed immediately by an evil hissing sound behind copilot Sam Catanzarite. Scearce heard navigator Art Boone say, “We’re hit!”

“Bombs away!” Schroeder reported, as the last 500-pound bomb fell from its rack. The plane seemed to leap in the air, free of its heavy burden. Deasy pushed the control yoke forward, nosing Dogpatch Express over, and put the throttles to the stops, getting the hell out of there fast.

The hissing slowed as Yankus traced the damage. Sunlight streamed through a hole just below the leading edge of the right wing. A piece of flak, a jagged shard of twisted metal three inches across, had come through the ship just behind Bob Lipe’s legs as he sat in the top turret. After cutting a compressed oxygen line, the bomb fragment had stabbed through the pilot’s seat. The Zeros harassed the trailing B-24s for half an hour more and finally turned away.

“How’d we do?” Deasy asked. There was a pause, a moment’s hesitation, before Yankus spoke. “Everything hit the water, sir.” Scearce had seen the splashes, too.

Scearce and Yankus swung their guns inside, locked the windows closed, and pulled the wind deflectors in tight to the sides of the plane. Bob Lipe stepped down from his turret, wiped his face on his sleeve, and looked up at the ugly hole in his plane’s skin. He hadn’t heard the impact. A few feet aft, and the flak might have hit the top turret. Ed Hess unfolded himself from the nose. Yankus steadied Johnson as he pulled himself from the belly turret and helped him jack it up and secure the turret inside the plane. Johnson stood and stretched, as he had before settling into the turret almost two hours before.

From the rear, they heard Marston say, “Fellas, I’m going to sit here a minute, watch our ass a little while.”

A Lonesome Return

Out of danger, the aircraft returned to a higher cruising altitude and continued toward Funafuti. Their targets, phosphate plants, gun positions, maintenance and barracks buildings, and runways on tiny Nauru, were so small that each plane had to make its bomb run alone. As a result, their return to Funafuti was staggered.

Since each plane had to find its own way, each crew needed a skilled navigator. There was nothing below but ocean, no point of reference except the sun. Navigators relied on dead reckoning, calculating position based on the previous position, taking into account time, heading, and drift. Errors in dead reckoning were cumulative, so each calculation increased the difference between the aircraft’s plotted position and its actual location. Because the aircraft were returning to a pinpoint island base hours away and burning limited fuel supplies, mistakes in dead reckoning could be deadly.

The “Navigator’s Information File” of the Army Air Forces advised: “In the Central Pacific celestial navigation is used in conjunction with dead reckoning on all missions. Many of the islands and atolls are plotted in error from 2 to 10 miles, usually eastward or westward. Interpretation of sun lines and fixes is important. Radio facilities are not always available in this area and you cannot always depend upon them because of local disturbances. Be careful when you use clouds for pilotage. Cumulus often builds up around islands, but shadows of clouds also look like land….”

Twelve hours after taking off, Dogpatch Express settled gently onto Funafuti’s dusty coral strip and Deasy taxied the bomber to a stop, guided by a ground crewman’s hand signals. On the ground again, the men of Dogpatch Express walked around their aircraft, checking it for damage. Some elevator fabric was torn away. There was the jagged flak hole behind and above the copilot’s seat, big enough for Yankus to put his fist through. Joe Deasy found the razor-sharp metal in his parachute pack where, its energy finally spent, it stopped less than an inch from the pilot’s spine.

“Brooks Didn’t Make it”

A ground crew corporal skidded up in a weapons carrier, wooden planks along its sides for seats, to take the crew of Dogpatch Express to the mess hall. There an intelligence officer debriefed them. He gathered information about enemy fighters, how many and what tactics they used, how aggressive they were. He made notes about the antiaircraft reception, bomb hits, fires started, what color the smoke was, and how far out the smoke could still be seen.

After their debriefing and after a few bites to eat, the men walked back to the flight line.  They counted 22 B-24s, all but one. Word got around about Lieutenant Russell Phillips’s crew. A burst from a Zero’s 20mm cannon had raked the side of Super Man, practically rolling the plane out of control.

Phillips struggled mightily to get back to Funafuti. There were hundreds of holes in his plane, plus the right rudder was half gone. Six men of Phillips’s crew were hurt, including Scearce’s good friend, Harold Brooks.  Brooks had been rushed from Super Man to the field hospital on Funafuti, rushed the short distance from the plane to the hospital, but only after the agonizingly slow flight of nearly six hours from Nauru.

Scearce returned to the tent that housed the enlisted men on his crew. He sat on his cot, untied his boots, and pulled them off. He lay down and stared straight up at the sloping canvas ceiling, turning his head when Jack Yankus stepped in. Yankus had lingered at the flight line with Dogpatch Express where he surveyed the severed oxygen line, checked for other damage, and got the latest news. Yankus said, “Brooks, uh … Brooks didn’t make it, Herman.”

A man injured on a bombing mission in the Pacific had hours to go, perhaps longer than any soldier in any theater of the war, before getting to a field hospital and a surgeon. There was little his crewmates could do beyond basic first aid, try to stop the bleeding, try to position the man correctly, give him morphine, maybe stop the pain. He would wait for hours, riding in his bomber back to a waiting ambulance and a field hospital.

Scearce responded weakly to Yankus, “That’s bad.” He sat up without looking back toward his friend, pulled his boots on again, and walked back to Dogpatch Express. At the plane, Scearce climbed through the open bomb bay and went to his gun position. He inspected his gun and decided against changing the barrel. Some gunners changed their barrels religiously, to be sure the gun would be straight and true for the next mission. A long burst from the .50s could generate enough heat to damage the barrel, but Scearce believed that a proper inspection of the gun was more sensible than frequent barrel changes. He would install a new barrel if and when the gun needed one.

 

The radioman got down on his knees on the floor of Dogpatch Express under the right waist window. In the silent, parked bomber he knelt for a moment on his flak jacket, still flattened on the metal floor. Kneeling there he scooped up spent .50-caliber machine-gun shell casings with both hands. He wondered whether Brooks had used his weapon, whether, just maybe, Brooks had gotten a burst into a Zero, possibly even the one that killed him.

Scearce dropped the spent brass into a galvanized metal bucket. After picking up the last few casings from the bottom of the airplane, he turned to check the left side and saw that Yankus had already cleaned up his area.  Scearce carried the bucket forward, dropped out of the plane through the bomb bay, and set the bucket of shell casings on the ground beside a tool cart. Maybe tomorrow the crew chief would empty the casings into the island’s waste dump.

After-Action Report: “Damage to Installations and Material was Heavy”

Intelligence information gathered from each air crew just returned from the Nauru mission was compiled and compared, and photos developed and analyzed, until an accurate accounting of the bombing results was completed. Maj. Gen. Willis Hale endorsed the final report, which was then sent to CincPac, the office of the Commander in Chief, Pacific Command.

The report described a highly successful mission: “All bombs dropped hit target except eight…. Damage to installations and material was heavy. Personnel casualties were extremely heavy. Large fires were observed in all bombed areas … a group of approximately twelve buildings in the center of the runway were destroyed…. Phosphate Plant #3 was completely demolished by at least two direct hits … at least three direct hits were made on Phosphate Plant #2 … this plant was completely destroyed. Six bombs destroyed at least three large warehouses, thirteen buildings, eleven small railroad cars, stock storage pile, two water tanks supplying plant … Diesel power plant, main plant elevator building, one water tank, five cisterns, seven buildings and water distillation plant badly damaged. A train of six 500-lb bombs burst in residential area. Large fires were started which were increasing in scope when last oblique photo was taken … most buildings in immediate area were destroyed. At least ten fragmentation bombs put out of action three machine gun positions and one heavy antiaircraft. At least fifteen motor vehicles were destroyed. Four two-engine bombers were completely destroyed, two of which burned … at least three one-engine fighter planes were destroyed.”

The report also described damage to American bombers, crediting all of it to attacking Japanese fighter aircraft, and noted that 12 airmen were wounded and one killed. The missing B-24, low on fuel, had landed at Nanumea, where it gassed up and made the hop back to Funafuti.

General Hale concluded his report, stating, “It is believed that this operation was the first successful attack against a valuable Japanese industrial installation since the raid on Tokyo. It was probably the longest offensive air operation of the war to date—the target was in excess of 3,200 miles by air from the home base of the attacking unit.”

After the attack, Nauru’s Japanese defenders rounded up their prisoners. These prisoners, 191 employees of the British Phosphate Commission, had been left behind when their colleagues evacuated ahead of the Japanese landing eight months before. Because they feared that the aerial bombardment was a precursor to an American invasion, an invasion that would never come, and because they would not risk the prisoners’ cooperation with the enemy, the Japanese executed them all.

The 11th Group crews on Funafuti prepared for another strike mission, but Dogpatch Express would not be in the lineup. Ground and flight crews spent the evening fueling and “bombing-up” undamaged airplanes for a raid against Tarawa atoll while repairs to planes damaged in the Nauru raid continued.

Repair and maintenance work on Funafuti was slow and improvised. As an advanced staging base, Funafuti was lightly equipped. The “72 hour kits” carried to the island in the bomb bays of the aircraft were adequate for three days’ maintenance, but repair to some of the damaged aircraft was beyond the capabilities of the base. The sheet metal work to Dogpatch Express was completed on Funafuti, but the severed oxygen line would wait until the plane returned to Oahu.

Life on Funafuti

A crew from Life magazine was on Funafuti, having accompanied the group on the flight from Hawaii via Canton. It seemed strange to the crewmen having the magazine people there because the airmen were not used to being newsworthy. But the Nauru raid was the first strike by American heavy bombers against a Japanese industrial target, and it seemed that the Air Corps wanted publicity for it. Besides chatting with officers, the Life crew toured the island in little groups, taking pictures and writing in notebooks while their officer escort pointed out Funafuti’s features.

The largest building on the island was the Missionary Church, a concrete structure with a wood-framed roof thatched with pandanus, the same plant natives used to weave mats. The church was built by the London Missionary Society on the west side of the island near the lagoon, almost even with the northeast end of the runway. It provided an easily recognizable visual reference for pilots. Native huts, about 60 of them in all, were on the lagoon side protected by the crescent curve of the island. The huts were rectangular, with corner posts of strong coconut trunks. Roofs were similar to the church, timber framed and thatched with pandanus. The sides of the huts were also thatched and made so they could be rolled up and tied open during the day. Gentle waves in the lagoon lapped at the beach, but on the eastern side, the ocean’s waves met the shore with noisy crashes and salty spray.

Funafuti was short on amenities, but the island did have the advantage of a friendly, cooperative native population, and the American servicemen at Funafuti were amused by the pretty, dark-skinned, and topless girls among the island’s several hundred natives. But the men were supposed to keep their distance from native women and “the novelty wore off soon enough,” Yankus recalled.

Many of the natives spoke English, learned from the London Missionary delegation. They were friendly. In fact, they had worked themselves to near exhaustion months before, helping men of the 5th Marine Defense Battalion, two companies of the 3rd Marines, elements of Navy Scouting Squadron 65, and a group of Seabees unload gear and equipment from their landing vessels.

A quirk of time and location had turned this place, an island paradise, into a wartime bomber base. As beautiful as it looked, like a Robinson Crusoe shipwreck setting, it was a sorry place for a military operation.

Each morning, the relentless equatorial sun heated aircraft and tools so quickly that it was difficult to work. Ground crews who serviced the several Marine Vought F4-U Corsair fighter planes and the Navy’s Kingfisher scout planes on Funafuti knew how critical it was to keep tools and equipment covered or put away because salt and sand were everywhere. In the afternoon, it rained, cooling things a bit, but the sun quickly cooked off the rain so that humidity joined forces with the heat to make working conditions miserable.

The coral runway built by the Seabees should have been as solid as concrete, but rain prevented the live coral used to build it from curing properly. The coral packed like gravel, rutted and dusty. When aircraft took off or landed, dust from the runway created storms of minute abrasive particles. The northeast to southwest orientation of the single airstrip offered no alternative if the predominantly easterly winds shifted to the southeast. In those conditions, pilots met a 90-degree crosswind, challenging enough with a heavy load on takeoff, but nerve-racking with low fuel, an engine out, or battle damage on the return.

Freshwater was provided by distillation units. The Marines and Navy men supplemented the water supply by catching rain runoff in barrels placed under the drape of their tents. In the middle of the island was a pond, really more of a swampy bog, that the Seabees had to partially fill when they built the runway, but the bog was of little practical use except to the island’s mosquito and rat populations.

The enlisted men of each bomber crew shared a tent. The canvas tents lacked floors and electricity and were equipped with cots. Officers were housed in a separate area, also in tents but with electricity from gas-powered generators.

Equipment for servicing bombers was barely adequate. Ground crewmen had two Cletracs, slow, tracked vehicles, more tractor than truck, for servicing aircraft. Cletracs were excellent for towing and parking aircraft but dreadfully slow for pulling gas trailers to refuel airplanes. A mess hall and barracks were planned, but for now the men made do with field kitchens and tents.

Eddie Rickenbacker on Funafuti

There was a one-room hospital on Funafuti, completed in November 1942. It had 40 field beds and was staffed by two doctors, a dentist, and 22 Navy corpsmen. They boasted that the famed World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker was among their first patients. Rickenbacker was one of seven survivors of an October 1942 B-17 crash in the ocean. Survivors drifted for weeks in their rafts before being rescued by a Kingfisher aircraft.

Rickenbacker and his men were taxied half an hour across water, lashed to the aircraft’s wing because the rescue made the plane overloaded for flight. The Kingfisher finally met a PT boat that took Rickenbacker the rest of the way to Funafuti.

There were a few bunkers for personnel, built by the Marines, but not enough for every man’s protection. There were shallow slit trenches and some holes where palm trees had been bulldozed down, but most of the island was too low for much digging. There were a few revetments for aircraft, but not enough to protect them all. The group’s best defense on Funafuti was secrecy, but there were only so many places from which B-24s could have attacked Nauru.

The Japanese may have sent a plane to follow the Americans as they returned, or they may have reconnoitered Funafuti undetected. The briefing officer on Kahuku who told the bomber crews bound for Funafuti that the Japanese would not know they were there had made no promise that the secret would last.

In fact, sometime during the night of April 20, just hours after the last B-24 returned, three twin-engined Mitsubishi aircraft took off from a Japanese air base on the island of Betio in the Tarawa atoll with full bomb loads. The Japanese planes turned south-southeast, headed for Funafuti.

“Air Raid! Air Raid!”

Scearce made his way to his crew’s tent before curfew. An ordnance truck, a bomb loader with a small crane attached to the rear, was parked nearby. Scearce assumed that whoever used it last must have parked it near his own tent. Parking it in the shade of coconut trees in the crew quarters area would keep the vehicle and its steering wheel a little cooler than parking it beside the runway.

Inside the tent, the enlisted men of Dogpatch Express chatted quietly. They talked about Nauru and the coming strike against Tarawa. They speculated about their next mission and whether Lieutenant Schroeder would get his bombs on target next time. Conversation faded quickly because the men were exhausted; they had not slept much the night before.

Shortly after midnight, the air raid signal sounded. A shrill, piercing siren, 10-second blasts at five-second intervals, caused the men to stir. Marines ran from tent to tent, yelling “Air raid! Air raid!”

Scearce and his heavy-eyed crewmates halfheartedly swung their legs to the ground, assuming this was someone’s idea of a joke or maybe a drill. Then a Marine Corps antiaircraft battery opened fire, boom … boom  … boom … and the men knew immediately it was no drill. They scrambled in the dark to pull on flight suits and ran out of their tents. Now aircraft could be heard, but the direction was indistinct, there was just the sound of unsynchronized aircraft engines overhead. A familiar voice shouted, “Get in the hole!”

There was a shallow hole near the crew’s tent, and Scearce piled in on top of his crewmates. Falling bombs made menacing whistling sounds while explosions threw orange flashes about treetops and tents, casting silhouettes of men running. The smell was pungent, like sulfur or a spent shotgun shell.

Forty terrified villagers huddled inside the Missionary Church, praying that its concrete walls would save them. Marine Corps Corporal Fonnie Black Ladd ran into the church, calling for the people to get out, imploring them to get away from the church, to take cover elsewhere because the church was an obvious target for the Japanese.

A salvo of bombs stepped toward the hole containing the men of Dogpatch Express, its pattern of explosions growing louder and closer. Scearce held the sides of his helmet with both fists clenched, trying desperately to fit under it. Knees to his chest, teeth gritted, and eyes squeezed tight, Scearce knew the next one whistling toward them would be very close.

With a terrific whang the bomb hit the ordnance truck parked just a few feet away. Dirt and metal rained down. In the next second, a hissing cylinder landed in the crew’s tiny hole, right on top of Elmer Johnson. For a moment, the men of Dogpatch Express could hear nothing, then the sensation of sound returned with a shrill ringing, and the powerful stench of explosives filled their nostrils. Scearce’s mind raced: “This is it,” he thought. The metal cylinder continued to hiss, and the men did not move, afraid they could cause it to explode.

Assessing the Damage

The hissing weakened, and the whistling of falling bombs and their terrific explosions finally stopped. Voices were audible now, agonized screams, cries for help, shouts, men giving orders. The enemy aircraft could be heard again, leaving the island toward the north, toward Tarawa. There were crackling and popping and strange metallic groans; an aircraft was burning. In the dim light of early morning, with gray-black smoke stinging their eyes, the enlisted men of Dogpatch Express accounted for each other.

“It’s a damn fire extinguisher,” Johnson said. The cylinder that landed on him, the hissing object that the crew feared was a bomb, was instead the damaged pressure tank of a brass fire extinguisher blasted from the ordnance truck when the truck took a direct hit.

Men had jumped under the truck for cover. Scearce thought there were four. Parts of bodies were strewn about, and one man still lay under the demolished truck. Scearce could tell the man was a staff sergeant by his stripes, but could not recognize him because his face and the top of his head were gone.

Corpsmen rushed to help the injured while others fought fires. Casualties were lined up by the airstrip in the shade of planes’ wings. As bulldozers cleared debris, the worst of the injured were placed aboard a plane to be sent back to the U.S. mainland. Others went to a hospital on Fiji, 670 miles south. Some injured men refused to be evacuated, insisting on staying with their crews.

One Liberator was burned completely. Smoking radial engines lay on the coral runway, propellers bent and folded under as if they were made of rubber. The twin vertical tail planes seemed intact, though the rudder fabric was scorched away. The tail section stood on the coral, pitched forward, as if the plane were in a steep dive.

Other aircraft were holed by shrapnel, tires blown out, and plexiglass shattered. Some of the planes could be repaired, and some would be scrapped and used for parts to keep others flying. Bomb-loading equipment, radio gear, the mess area and tents were damaged, burned, or blown down by the concussion of bombs. The walls of the Missionary Church stood, but its roof was gone and its interior was gutted. A bomb had crashed through the thatched roof and exploded, bringing roof timbers and flaming, dried pandanus down into the building vacated by the villagers a moment before.

A young native man named Esau Sepetaina lay on his back as if resting, arms at his side, his chin, mouth, and left ear visible, but the rest of his head was smashed like a melon. He was the only native killed in the raid, and he died beside one of the few true personnel bunkers in Funafuti’s shallow earth, his feet just inches from the edge.

On to the Next Mission

On the morning after the air raid, Scearce, Lipe, Yankus, and Johnson stood with a handful of other men near the broken remains of the ordnance truck, watching helplessly as medical corpsmen lifted one of the dead men from the wreckage. They felt hollow, sick, and at the same time relieved it was not them. Beside the wrecked truck lay its splattered and torn seat and the vehicle’s battery, and beyond them a Life magazine photographer captured the scene on film.

On April 21, Dogpatch Express took off past the still smoldering remains of a sister aircraft. The bombers in the lineup for the next mission stayed behind, scheduled to hit Tarawa the next night. The long flight back to Hawaii, with its overnight stop at Canton, lacked the sense of purpose and anticipation of success that sustained the men on the way out. The return flight felt like retreat. The men felt beaten.

The Japanese air raid consisted of a few medium bombers making several passes at night. The enemy planes had traversed the island, back and forth, as if without concern about the three Marine Corps antiaircraft batteries. The Japanese took their time, working thoroughly and deliberately, taking advantage of a full moon’s light on Funafuti’s white coral runway. Their show of skill was sobering to the American bomber crewmen, particularly the men of Dogpatch Express, who had seen their bombs explode in the water just off the sandy beach of Nauru.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Phil Scearce originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Warfare History Network

Security, Asia

The Mongols began besieging the more than one million residents of Beijing.

Key Point: The Mongols attacked the Xi Xia in 1209, first taking the border settlements north of the Yellow River.

In ad 1205, Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, having completed the unification of his Gobi Desert empire, began looking south toward China for further conquest. The ever-truculent Mongols had been a thorn in China’s side for more than 2,000 years. Their many raids were the main reason the Chinese had constructed a 1,500-mile-long Great Wall from the eastern coast on the Pacific Ocean to the very edge of the Gobi. Not without reason did the Chinese consider the Mongols barbarians—their very name meant “earth shakers.” At the head of a united army of fearsome nomads, Genghis Khan would soon make the earth shake again.

War With Xi Xia

Genghis’s first target was the western Chinese kingdom of Xi Xia. The Xi, known to the Mongols as the Tanguts, had emigrated east from the mountains of Tibet to the hilly grasslands centered on the Yellow River in the 7th century ad. The Mongols and the Xi, as wary neighbors, shared some of the same relatives; one of Genghis’s own stepdaughters was the wife of a Tangut chieftain. Family ties meant little to Genghis Khan. His father, Yesugei, had been poisoned by grudge-bearing members of a Tatar clan when Genghis, then called Temujin, was eight. Five years later, Temujin killed his own half brother Begter in cold blood after the two quarreled over some birds and minnows that Temujin had caught. “Apart from our shadows we have no friends,” he had been taught from the cradle. It was lesson he never forgot. After he had consolidated his power, Genghis Khan killed every male member of the Tatar clan that had killed his father—any boy taller than a wagon wheel was struck down.

The Mongols attacked the Xi Xia in 1209, first taking the border settlements north of the Yellow River. The 75,000 Mongol invaders faced an army of 150,000 Xi Xia troops near their capital at Zhongxing. The Xi Xia had stationed 100,000 armored pikemen and crossbowmen in large phalanxes in the center of the battle line, with 25,000 Tangut cavalry on each wing. The Mongols were not accustomed to being outnumbered. As nomadic warriors they traveled fast, in huge columns of superbly skilled cavalry, often separated by many miles but knit together by an intricate system of signal fires, smoke signals, and flags, and a gigantic camel-mounted kettledrum to sound the charge. They were used to coordinating their forces on small settlements or camps whose residents could not move with anything like the same speed or decisiveness. The Mongols were interested not in a fair fight, but a victorious one.

In the Xi Xia, however, they ran into an opponent who fought much the same way they did. The Mongols had taken extensive casualties in an earlier battle with the Xi Xia pikemen by charging their pike wall; they were determined to not repeat the mistake. The Mongol light cavalry rode parallel to the Chinese pikemen and crossbowmen, firing thousands of arrows into them while other Mongol forces fought with Tangut cavalry on the flanks. The Mongol and Tangut cavalry also rode parallel to each other, firing thousands of arrows and inflicting innumerable casualties on each side. Each side’s cavalry feigned retreat, but the other side wouldn’t fall for the ruse. Finally, the Mongols attacked the Tangut cavalry with their heavy cavalry. The Tangut cavalry broke and ran, leaving the huge phalanxes of the Xi Xia pikemen vulnerable to attack. The Chinese pikemen had formed a giant rectangle that faced in all directions, and they took repeated volleys of arrows that inflicted great damage while the Mongols themselves stayed mostly out of range of the Chinese crossbows. After the Xi Xia pikemen lost unit cohesion, the Mongol heavy cavalry attacked the remaining demoralized and exhausted Chinese from all sides to finish them off.

Besieging Zhongxing

The Xi Xia capital of Zhongxing presented a new problem for the Mongols, who had little experience in siege warfare. In an earlier siege of the walled city of Volohai, the Mongols had attempted a series of suicidal assaults with scaling ladders that failed, and they suffered heavy casualties in the fighting. Genghis offered to lift the siege of the city provided the residents gave the Mongols 1,000 cats and 10,000 swallows in cages. The puzzled citizens of Volohai quickly granted the request—and just as quickly lived to regret it when the animals fled back into the city with tufts of flaming wool tied to each of them by the Mongols. Soon, the whole city was ablaze. While the defenders were occupied with putting out the fire, the Mongols scaled the now undefended walls and massacred the inhabitants.

Genghis did not want to face a similar costly assault of the walls of Zhongxing. Instead, he decided to break the dikes on the Huang River and flood the city below. The plan backfired, however, when the Mongol camp itself was flooded and hundreds of troops were swept away by the raging waters. To make matters worse, the move left two feet of standing water for miles around the city, in effect creating a ready-made moat. The Mongols retreated into the surrounding hills but returned in force in 1210. Xi Xia Emperor Li Anquan, not wishing to face another siege, agreed to give his daughter Chaka to Genghis Khan as a wife and to pay tribute to the Mongols as a vassal state. Genghis demanded and received another 1,000 young men and women, 3,000 horses, and vast quantities of gold, jewelry, and silk. The Xi Xia later rebelled in 1218 and 1223 because they tired of providing the Mongols with so many men to fight in their wars of conquest, but these rebellions were brutally put down.

Routing the Jin

In 1210, an emissary of the newly installed Jin emperor, Prince Wei, appeared before Genghis and demanded his submission and a tribute paid to the Jin. An infuriated Genghis answered that it was the Jin who needed to pay tribute to him; he spat on the ground as a gesture of defiance. With his flank secured by the conquest of Xi Xia, Genghis was ready to attack the mighty Jin Dynasty. In 1211, 30,000 Mongol troops under Genghis’s greatest general, Subedei, assaulted the Great Wall. The Mongols brought up groups of archers who cleared an area of wall while other Mongols scaled the wall with ladders and took possession of sections of it. The Jin rushed in reinforcements and recaptured the lost sections of the Great Wall. Thousands died on both sides as the fighting continued back and forth for several days.

The Jin brought most of their army to back up the forces defending the Great Wall. What the Jin didn’t know was that Subedei’s attack was merely a diversion. Some 200 miles to the west, Genghis and a force of 90,000 Mongols were crossing the Great Wall at its end in the Gobi Desert. The Onguts, a tribe similar to the Mongols, were supposed to be guarding the western end of the Great Wall for the Chin, but they defected to Genghis and allowed the Mongols to cross into China unmolested. After Genghis’s cavalry poured into China, Subedei’s force broke off its attack and crossed over into China from the end of the Great Wall as well.

The Jin forces were now out of position and moved to cut off the Mongols from Beijing. Genghis’s cavalry caught close to 200,000 Jin troops on open ground near Badger Pass, where the Jin hoped to block the Mongols from advancing any farther. The Jin formed for battle with the pike phalanxes and crossbowmen in the middle and armored heavy cavalry on the flanks. The outnumbered Mongol heavy cavalry engaged in a hotly contested battle on the flanks with the Jin cavalry as the densely packed Jin phalanxes and their crossbowmen held off the Mongol horse archers. Suddenly, Subedei’s remaining 27,000 Mongols (3,000 had died at the Great Wall) showed up on the battlefield on the flanks and rear of the Jin army. The rout was on.

After the Jin cavalry was defeated, the Jin pikemen, half of whom were militia conscripts, broke and ran. They were cut down by the Mongol cavalry or trampled by their own terrified horsemen. Bodies stacked “like rotten logs” littered the ground for more than 30 miles. Genghis then separated his army into three forces that burned, pillaged, raped, and murdered the populations of 90 cities over the next six months. Despite the awful destruction, the Jin would not surrender. Genghis became frustrated by the enormous size and scope of a nation-state like the Jin. He entered into negotiations with the emperor and agreed not to attack any more cities. The Mongols had already captured well over 100,000 Chinese prisoners; to make a negotiating point, Genghis had them executed.

The Capture of Beijing

The next year the Jin moved their capital farther south, from Beijing to Kaifeng, and began rebuilding their armies. Genghis was angered by the move, which he considered a betrayal of trust, and looked for an opportunity to attack the Jin again. In the spring of 1213, the Jin attacked the Mongol-allied Khitan tribe in Manchuria. Genghis came to the aid of his Khitan allies and attacked the Jin armies in Manchuria, which fell back to their fortifications at Nankuo Pass. The Mongols were blocked from attacking Beijing by the well-fortified Jin positions at the pass and by the eastern sections of the Great Wall. The Mongols headed into the pass and then retreated. It was all a ruse. The Jin forces hurried to trap the fleeing Mongols, recklessly leaving their fortified positions to pursue them. The Mongols led the Jin forces into their own trap and destroyed most of the Jin army. Those Jin troops that had not pursued the Mongols fled their fortified positions and retreated to the Great Wall, with the Mongols in hot pursuit. The Mongols caught and destroyed the remaining Jin troops as they tried frantically to retreat through the Great Wall. The Mongols then passed through the open gates of the Great Wall.

The Mongols began besieging the more than one million residents of Beijing. Beijing was a tough nut to crack, with walls and moats that extended more than nine miles around the city, and was watched over by 900 towers. The city’s defenders had double and triple crossbow ballistae and trebuchet catapults that fired clay pots filled with naphtha-like incendiaries that exploded and set on fire whatever they hit. The Jin also introduced one of the first poison gas weapons in history, firing projectiles bound in wax and paper of 70 pounds of dried human waste, ground-up poisonous herbs, roots, and beetles packed in gunpowder. The projectiles were lit with a fuse and fired from a trebuchet, creating a deadly cloud of toxic fumes that killed or disabled anyone unfortunate enough to breathe in the poisonous dust.

The Jin also had clay-pot firebombs filled with incendiaries to throw from the walls and hot oil to pour down on attackers. The Mongols launched attacks against the walls with ladders, but lost dozens of men to the incendiaries and the hot oil. The Mongols then forced Jin prisoners to build and push forward siege engines and serve as human shields for the attackers. Jin soldiers would recognize family and friends among the captives and hold their fire. Many Jin prisoners were killed from missed crossbow fire aimed at the Mongols and from the bombs used to burn down the siege engines before they could get into the city.

The Mongols and their Chinese human shields dug trenches covered by cowhide up to the walls to undermine them, but the Jin dropped firebombs from chains onto the trenches that exploded with such force that they left only smoldering craters and no intact human remains. The siege dragged on for a year as starvation and disease began killing people on both sides of the walls, but the defenders, with more than a million people to feed, had the worst of it. Two Jin relief columns loaded down with food were intercepted by the Mongols, and some defenders in Beijing turned to cannibalism to survive.

In June 1215, the Jin commander escaped to Kaifeng, where he was executed by the emperor for leaving his post. The desperate people of Beijing then opened the gates of the city to the Mongols, who ransacked the city and massacred thousands in revenge for their ordeal. The city was set on fire. Thousands of girls ran to the city’s steepest walls and threw themselves to their deaths to escape the flames and the unwanted amorous attention of the Mongols. A year later, the ambassador of Khwarezm described seeing mountains of bones inside and outside of what had been the greatest city in the world.

The Death of Genghis, the Ascension of Ogedei

Despite the overwhelming victories, the Mongols were trapped in a long war of attrition in China. Rather than finish the conquest of the Jin, Genghis became sidetracked in 1217 in the destruction of Khwarezm (Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), an Islamic holocaust in which more than a million people were massacred by the Mongols. During the campaign to conquer Khwarezm, the Mongols brought in thousands of Chinese engineers, siege engines, and crews to help reduce Islamic fortifications.

In 1223, Genghis turned his attention back on the Jin. He sent a trusted general, Mukhulai, with 100,000 troops to attack Chang’an, which was defended by 200,000 Jin troops. Mukhulai became ill and died. As soon as this happened, the Xi Xia troops abandoned the Mongol army, which in turn caused the siege to be abandoned. Genghis then hunted down and killed the Xi Xia troops who had deserted his army.

Genghis himself died in 1227, probably from typhus, while planning yet another massive invasion of Jin. His son, Ogedei, ascended the throne and sent envoys to the Jin, who promptly had them executed. Meanwhile, Subedei was to conduct one last effort to conquer the Jin in 1231. The Jin armies all faced north to prevent Subedei’s 120,000 Mongols from crossing the Yellow River. Subudei sent a general named Tuli with 30,000 Mongols on an arduous journey across the western Chinese mountains of Sichuan and through Song territory into southern Jin territory.

The Jin panicked, thinking the Mongol force was much bigger than it was. The Jin repositioned the majority of their troops to the south and began pursuing the Mongols with a massive force of over 300,000 men. The Mongols retreated as planned into the Sichuan Mountains as the huge Jin army followed them. The Mongols fought a tenacious rearguard action with their archers in the rough mountain terrain, killing thousands of pursuing Jin. The Mongols led the Jin higher and deeper into the snow-covered mountains, where additional thousands froze to death or fell off the icy trails. The Mongols circled back through the mountain passes and destroyed the Jin baggage trains, adding starvation to the woes the Jin troops were already enduring.

Once Subedei had the main Jin army trapped in the mountains of Sichuan, he moved his 120,000 Mongols across the Yellow River against the much smaller Jin forces. The Jin belatedly realized their mistake and began desperately trying to get their main army out of the mountains to defend the capital. The Jin retreat turned into a rout as Tuli’s and Subedei’s forces massacred the entire Jin army without mercy on the open ground within sight of Kaifeng.

The Siege of Kaifeng

The Mongols had learned well from their Chinese prisoners how to conduct sieges. They built a 54-mile-long wooden wall of contravallation to hem in Kaifeng’s one million frightened inhabitants. In addition to the almost 150,000 Mongols conducting the siege, the Song sent 300,000 troops to help finish off their Jin enemies. For six days, the Mongol and Song armies assaulted Kaifeng’s wall but took thousands of casualties from a dreaded weapon called a ho pao, a long bamboo tube filled with incendiaries that could be lit with a fuse or thrown into siege engines from holes in the walls to explode with such force that it left craters in the ground and burned everyone in the immediate vicinity. Thousands of Mongol and Song Chinese troops died in assaults against Kaifeng’s stout walls.

It was clear to Subedei that a long siege was needed to reduce the Jin capital. Plague soon broke out in Kaifeng, and Subedei withdrew his forces to let the disease destroy his enemies while the Mongol and Song armies remained plague-free. Within a month, the Jin emperor committed suicide and the Mongol and Song armies broke into Kaifeng and began massacring the population. Ogedei ordered the massacre to be stopped and aid brought to the suffering people. Subedei wanted to massacre the entire Jin population and turn the farmland into grazing fields for Mongol horses, but Ogedei overruled him. Ogedei’s Chinese advisers had convinced him that the Jin population would provide lucrative taxes, craftsmen, and soldiers for future Mongol conquests. The Jin held out until 1234 before being overwhelmed by the combined Mongol and Song forces, ending the Jin dynasty forever.

In 1235, the Song sent their armies to occupy the Jin cities they understood would be given to them by the Mongols for their part in the war. Instead, the Song armies were repulsed by Mongol forces using many of the same weapons and methods to defend the cities that they had learned from the Jin. This started a 43-year-long war between the Mongols and the Song that would claim many more thousands of lives. In 1236, the Mongols captured the city of Xiangyang in Sichuan Province. The Mongols and the Song fought for control of Sichuan around the city of Chengdu until 1248, when the Mongols gained solid possession of the area. By 1248, the Mongols had killed hundreds of thousands of Song and reduced many Sichuan cities to rubble.

The Yuan Dynasty

In 1251, Mongke was elected Great Khan and decided to intensify the war with the Song Dynasty. In 1253, some 100,000 Mongols and their Chinese allies captured Dali and Yunnan and crossed through Laos to attack the Song Empire’s southern flank. The next year, the Mongols clashed with more than 100,000 Song troops and 1,000 war elephants near the Laotian border. The Mongol horses would not charge the elephants, so the Mongols dismounted and fired flaming arrows to kill or enrage the great animals, which became uncontrollable and randomly killed men on both sides. The battle degenerated into a chaotic hand-to-hand battle. Both armies virtually annihilated each other, and the Mongols withdrew into Laos with only 20,000 men. In 1257, Mongke made the mistake of invading Da Viet (North Vietnam) and lost most of the rest of his men and horses to disease in the intense tropical conditions.

In 1258, Mongke pulled together 300,000 Mongol and Chinese soldiers to face a massive army of over 400,000 Song Chinese troops under General Wang Jian in Sichuan. In 1259, the two sides met at the Battle of Diaoyucheng. During the battle, Mongke collapsed and died from cholera and dysentery. The battle ended in stalemate, with more than 100,000 dead on both sides, including Wang Jian. The new commanding Song general, Jia Sidao, collaborated with Genghis Khan’s grandson, Prince Kublai, and worked out a deal whereby the Song army would occupy Sichuan under Mongol authority. After the Mongol forces left Sichuan, Jia Sidao reneged on his agreement and reoccupied Xiangyang, returning Sichuan to Song control. In 1260, Jia Sidao took his army back into Song territory and established himself as prime minister with a new young emperor named Zhao Qi, who would serve as puppet ruler. Meanwhile, Kublai left Sichuan and took his army back to Mongolia to stake his claim as the new khan of the Mongol Empire. Later that same year, Kublai became khan of the Mongols and established the Yuan Dynasty in China, with himself as emperor.

A Five-Year Siege

In 1265, a Chinese allied naval force destroyed 100 Song ships in a river battle, and Mongol troops defeated the isolated Song army to regain control of part of Sichuan. The key to conquering the Song was capturing the twin fortress cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng. Both cities had thick walls with wide moats protecting the convergence of the Han and Yellow Rivers. In 1268, the Mongols built fortifications downriver from Xiangyang on the Han River to cut off resupply of the city by ship. Most Song ships were able to run by the Mongol forts and resupply Xiangyang and Fancheng. Chinese ships allied with the Mongols were brought in to block the passage between the Mongol forts. More than 20 miles of siege lines were built around Xiangyang and Fancheng on both sides of the Han River.

The Mongols and their Chinese engineers set up trebuchets and began firing incendiary clay bombs and exploding biochemical projectiles they had learned from the Jin at the siege of Beijing in 1215. The Song fired incendiary bombs and biochemical projectiles at the Mongols as well, causing great destruction and loss of life on both sides. The Mongols had to pull back after their wooden siege walls and trebuchets caught fire from the bombardments, leaving the Mongols with no cover, while the Song defenders took shelter behind the twin cities’ stout rock and masonry walls.

In 1269, Kublai Khan sent another 20,000 troops to replace those in the previous year’s fighting. More than 3,000 Song ships attacked the Mongol forts on the Han River in an effort to break the blockade, but 500 ships were sunk by Kublai Khan’s brilliant admiral Liu Cheng, who had defected to the Mongols. Mongol and Chinese troops clambered aboard the Song vessels and beheaded hundreds of Song soldiers and sailors.

The besieged Song tried several unsuccessful attempts to break out but were defeated each time with thousands of casualties. In 1271, 100 Song ships successfully broke through a boom across the Han River to bring 3,000 soldiers and much-needed supplies to reinforce Xiangyang. The siege dragged on with no real advantage for either side until Kublai Khan decided to send a Muslim engineer captured during the siege of Baghdad to China to build a giant 40-ton trebuchet that could hurl 220-pound projectiles more than 600 feet to breach the cities’ walls. After a few days, a breach was opened and Mongol troops stormed through to meet the Chinese defenders. For days, men fought and died in the vicious battle at the breach.

The Song were able to throw more soldiers into Fancheng to defend the breach from a pontoon bridge that connected Xiangyang across the Han River. The Mongols called off the assault on the breach and used their giant trebuchet to widen the breach and destroy the pontoon bridge. Incendiary bombs fired from the trebuchet struck the bridge and consumed it. With Fancheng cut off from reinforcements, the Mongols assaulted the widened breach. The disheartened defenders held on for several hours before resistance broke and the Mongols poured into the city and began massacring the inhabitants. The Mongols took the last 3,000 Song soldiers and 7,000 inhabitants to the walls facing Xiangyang and in full view slit the prisoners’ throats and threw them off the wall.

The Mongols then dismantled their giant trebuchet and repositioned it across the river facing Xiangyang. The first shot from the trebuchet forced a tower to collapse in a great crash as the Song inhabitants screamed in terror. Kublai Khan offered to spare the inhabitants and to reward the Song commander if he would surrender the city. Xiangyang was surrendered and the Song heartland was open to the Mongols. The siege had lasted from 1268 to 1273.

74 Years of Conquest

In 1274, the Mongols headed down the Han River, bypassing Song fortresses and emerging onto the flood plains of the Yangtze River. The Mongols now faced the impregnable fortress of Yang-lo. The Mongols sacrificed several thousand Chinese troops on a frontal attack on Yang-lo while most of the Mongol army, carrying a number of ships, bypassed the fort and crossed the river upstream. Then the Mongol and Chinese fleet came down the Yangtze and attacked the Song fleet from both front and behind. The Song boats were packed so close together on the river that incendiary bombs fired from Mongol catapults set much of the Song fleet on fire. Thousands perished in the flames. Fortress Yang-lo and the 100,000 cut-off Song troops surrendered the next day.

In 1275, Jia Sidao set out from the capital of Hangzhou at the head of 100,000 Song troops and another fleet of 2,500 ships in a last-ditch effort to stop the Mongol juggernaut. A massive cavalry and infantry battle took place on both sides of the river. The Mongols and their Chinese allies pushed back the Song army and boarded their ships from both ends of the river, beheading thousands of Song troops and capturing 2,000 ships. It was another overwhelming victory for the Mongols. Jia Sidao was later assassinated by a Song officer.

The city of Hangzhou refused an offer to surrender peacefully and was burned. As usual, the Mongols massacred the city’s inhabitants. On February 21, 1276, the boy emperor Zhao Xian came out of Hangzhou, bowed toward the north in obeisance to Kublai Khan, and turned over the capital and the rest of the Song Empire to the Mongols. The Mongol conquest of China had taken 74 years and claimed the lives of as many as 25 million Chinese from war, plague, and famine.

The ramifications of the Mongol conquest of China were felt for some time. The Ming, who overthrew the Mongols in 1368, became obsessed with improving and lengthening the Great Wall to close to 5,000 miles (including walls that backed up walls) to prevent another Mongol invasion of China. The Great Wall as it existed from the time of the Ming Dynasty was an expensive reaction to the Mongol conquest of China. In the end, the improved Great Wall did not save China. In 1644, a Mongol-like nation, the Manchu, conquered China and ruled the unhappy nation until 1911.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Steven M. Johnson originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Flickr.

Warfare History Network, Michael D. Hull

Security, Africa

The Commandos learned their bitter lessons and went on to serve in many World War II campaigns as a peerless special force—mentoring the U.S. Rangers and setting an example for other elite assault units in the years to come.

Key Point: His mission on this particular night was a hazardous one—to locate the headquarters of the commander of the German forces in North Africa, the legendary General Erwin Rommel.

One night in mid-October 1941, a British Army intelligence officer disguised as a Senussi Arab was dropped by parachute behind the German lines in the Italian colony of Libya.

He was Captain John E. “Jock” Haselden of the famed Long-Range Desert Group (LRDG), a specialized British force led by Lt. Col. David Stirling that conducted reconnaissance patrols and hit-and-run raids against enemy installations in North Africa. Bearded and weather beaten, Haselden wore tattered Arab robes and carried a staff while venturing out alone on his intelligence-gathering forays. Born and raised in Egypt and a former Cairo cotton broker, he was fluent in Arabic.

His mission on this particular night was a hazardous one—to locate the headquarters of the commander of the German forces in North Africa, the legendary General Erwin Rommel. Haselden was to lay the groundwork for a bold attempt—tied to a major offensive by the British Eighth Army—to either capture or kill Rommel and his cantankerous Italian field commander, General Ettore Bastico. For several months, Rommel had proved to be a skillful and formidable foe by outwitting and outmaneuvering the British during the seesawing Western Desert campaigns.

Based on radio intercepts of German message traffic, “Sigint” (Signals Intelligence) at the British Middle Eastern Command headquarters in Cairo had come to the conclusion that a remote village named Beda Littoria in the northern Libyan hump was the probable site of Rommel’s headquarters.

After burying his parachute in the sand, Captain Haselden trudged to the outskirts of the dusty village a dozen miles south of the Mediterranean coast, west of Derna and not far from the site of the ancient city of Cyrene, the birthplace of Hannibal, to verify the Sigint information. Stealthily, he trained his field glasses on stuccoed Italian colonial buildings clustered in olive and cypress groves and groups of German troops.

Off to one side, Haselden could see a villa and an official building that the Italians called the Prefettura. Parked around it were about 20 Afrika Korps communications trucks, while a steady stream of vehicles disgorged and retrieved officers and dispatch riders. The British officer gasped when he spotted General Rommel striding out of the Prefettura and driving off in a command car. Haselden had hit the jackpot; apparently Beda Littoria was indeed the headquarters of the “Desert Fox.”

Haselden hastily stole away into the desert and linked up with a LRDG patrol two days later. He was whisked back to Cairo with his information, and plans and preparations were drawn up. By mounting a raid on Rommel’s headquarters, the British hoped to wreak chaos in the command system of the Afrika Korps and its Italian allies. The operation was likely to prove one of the most daring special force missions of World War II.

The British Commandos assigned to carry out the mission had come to the Mediterranean theater as part of the “Layforce” contingent led by Lt. Col. Robert E. “Lucky” Laycock, commander of Commando operations and the elite Special Boat Section there. One of his units was the 11th (Scottish) Commando, which had practiced night landings from submarines using rubber dinghies and lightweight canvas canoes called folbots.

The idea for the raid on Rommel’s headquarters 250 miles behind enemy lines had been formulated in the autumn of 1941 by temporary Lt. Col. Geoffrey Charles Tasker Keyes of the 11th Commando, the 24-year-old son of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes. A decorated hero of the Boxer Rebellion and the Zeebrugge and Dover naval actions in World War I, Sir Roger had been chosen by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to direct all Commando operations from Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations headquarters.

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A brave, competent officer and the youngest lieutenant colonel in the British Army, Keyes led the planning for the upcoming raid—code named Operation Flipper—and insisted on leading it personally. Simultaneous actions to support the November 16-17 British offensive codenamed Operation Crusader were to be undertaken by the LRDG and the Special Air Service. The initial objectives of the Laycock-Keyes force were to attack the Italian forces’ headquarters at Cyrene and destroy telephone and telegraph services; hit the Italian intelligence center at Appollonia; cut communication lines around El Faida, and assault the Afrika Korps headquarters at Beda Littoria and Rommel’s villa west of the village.

Colonel Laycock, himself a gallant veteran of special operations in Libya, Rhodes, and Crete who would later win the Distinguished Service Order and lead Commandos and U.S. Rangers in the invasion of Salerno, voiced reservations about the planned mission. A London-born former subaltern in the Royal Horse Guards, he reported, “I gave it my considered opinion that the chances of being evacuated after the operation were very slender, and that the attack on General Rommel’s house in particular appeared to be desperate in the extreme. This attack, even if initially successful, meant almost certain death for those who took part in it. I made these comments in the presence of Colonel Keyes, who begged me not to repeat them lest the operation be canceled.”

Laycock tried several times to persuade Keyes to detail a more junior officer to lead the raid, but he refused. “On each occasion,” said Laycock, “he flatly declined to consider these suggestions, saying that, as commander of his detachment, it was his privilege to lead his men into any danger that might be encountered—an answer which I consider [was] inspired by the highest traditions of the British Army…. Colonel Keyes’s outstanding bravery was not that of the unimaginative bravado who may be capable of spectacular action in moments of excitement, but that far more admirable calculated daring of one who knew only too well the odds against him.” Despite his misgivings, Laycock agreed to accompany the raiding force as an observer.

On the night of Thursday-Friday, November 13-14, 1941, after a three-day voyage from Alexandria, two 1,575-ton Royal Navy submarines, HMS Torbay and HMS Talisman, carrying 60 Commandos, stood off the coast of Djebel Akhdar, 20 miles west of Appollonia, Libya. Periscope observations were made of the planned landing area. From a small cove on the shore, Captain Haselden, who had been designated to guide the raiders to Rommel’s headquarters, sent a prearranged signal out to the submarines. As soon as his blinking lights were spotted, the vessels flashed back a recognition signal.

But things began to go wrong from the start. The Commandos had been trained to disembark from submarines in calm waters, but a gale was howling on the Libyan coast that night. Rough seas hampered the operation. Instead of the estimated 90 minutes, it took seven hours to get 28 men and Colonel Keyes, the operational commander, ashore from the slippery deck of the first submarine, the Torbay.

When the Talisman neared the shore to disembark her Commandos, she touched bottom. In the resulting turmoil, seven landing boats with 11 men were swept overboard. Several were never seen again. A few men managed to scramble ashore, but the Talisman withdrew with many members of the raiding force still aboard.

Early in the morning of November 14, Keyes assembled his men in Haselden’s cove, a dozen miles from Beda Littoria. All were wet, chilled to the bone, and critically short of vital weapons and equipment. The little force was considerably understrength for its mission. Keyes was furnished with directions and an Arab shepherd as his guide, while Haselden slipped away to get ready for the second part of his assignment—to blow up a German communications outpost on the same night that Keyes’s team hit Rommel’s headquarters.

Colonel Laycock, meanwhile, decreed that under the circumstances the Commandos’ objectives must be curtailed. It was agreed that only two of the four planned attacks would be undertaken—on the communications systems at Cyrene and the German headquarters at Beda Littoria. The plan to hit Rommel’s villa was dropped.

Laycock stayed at the landing site to coordinate operations while Keyes, Captain Robin Campbell, his second in command, and the 28 Commandos set off at nightfall on November 15 for a grueling trek to their objectives. Rain poured for 48 hours, and the raiders were soaked as they splashed through ankle-deep mud, slipped on greasy rocks, and picked their way over rock-strewn sheep tracks and a 1,800-foot ridge in the darkness. Their Arab guide refused to go farther as the weather deteriorated, and morale began to flag. But Keyes’s stolid resolve kept his men moving forward. By the night of November 16, the column had reached a small cave about five miles from Beda Littoria.

The Commandos spent the rest of the night and most of the following day there. Keyes stayed on the beach through the night to meet any men who might have managed to get ashore from the second submarine. The hideout was odorous and uncomfortable, but the raiders found shelter from the torrential rain and cold that had plagued them almost continually since coming ashore. They lit a fire to warm themselves and dry their clothing, cleaned their Sten submachine guns and .38-caliber pistols, and groused about the absence of the blazing sunshine that reputedly bathed the southern Mediterranean shore.

On the afternoon of November 17, Colonel Keyes made a short reconnaissance foray then briefed his men at 6 pm. He divided his small force in two, sending one half off to detonate a communications pylon near Cyrene while the rest listened to his detailed plan for the assault on Rommel’s headquarters. Then, with blackened faces and wearing plimsolls (sneakers), they set off on the final stage of their mission.

The raiders bided their time during the waning daylight hours and moved forward in darkness to a ridge just above Beda Littoria. Pushing on, they reached the outskirts of the village around midnight and crept forward stealthily toward the German headquarters in the Preffetura, an austere, two-story building standing away from the main village. Keyes and Sergeant Terry were in the lead, about 50 yards ahead.

Suddenly, one of the Commandos tripped over a tin can, setting off frenzied barking from neighborhood dogs and a scream from an Arab villager. When two Italian soldiers emerged from a hut to investigate, the quick-thinking Captain Campbell shouted to them in fluent German that they were an Afrika Korps patrol. The disgruntled Italians went back into their hut.

By this time, Colonel Keyes had cut through the wire surrounding the headquarters building. The rain that had hampered his men now yielded a dividend, confining the enemy sentries to their tents, except one. Keyes dispatched him quietly with his fighting knife, and the rest of the force joined him, carrying enough explosives to wreck both the Prefettura and a nearby power plant.

With a covering party blocking the approaches to the building and guarding the exits from neighboring structures, Keyes, Campbell, Sergeant Terry, and three other ranks crept forward through the security fence. But the mission was about to turn into a fiasco. Keyes, Campbell, and Terry planned to sneak into the Nazi headquarters. Keyes hoped to climb through a window or find a back door but a quick investigation revealed no easy access. So the raiders took the bull by the horns.

Captain Campbell pounded on the front door and demanded entry in his fluent German. When a sentry eventually opened the door, Keyes jammed his revolver in the startled soldier’s ribs. But the brave, well-trained German grabbed the muzzle and backed Keyes against a wall. The colonel struggled to draw his knife while the enemy soldier shouted an alarm. The element of surprise was lost. Campbell shot the struggling German over Keyes’s shoulder, and the colonel flung the door open.

The six British raiders dashed inside, and the next few minutes brought a chaos of Sten-gun and pistol fire, shouts of anguish and alarm, slamming doors, and running feet on stone steps. A duty officer had aroused sleeping Germans. A man came clattering down the stairs, but Sergeant Terry chased him off with a burst from his Sten gun.

The raiders checked one of many rooms off the main hall and found it empty. Then a door on the left side of the hall started to open. A light shone inside, and the Commandos could hear the occupants moving about. Keyes kicked the door open wide to see about 10 Germans in helmets frozen in shock. After the colonel emptied his Colt .45 automatic pistol into the room, Campbell appeared at his elbow and said he would toss a hand grenade in. Keyes shut the door while Campbell pulled the pin, reopened it, and the grenade and a burst of Sten-gun fire went in.

The grenade exploded with a loud crash, but some of the surviving Germans fired back at the raiders. A single shot hit Keyes just above the heart. Campbell and Terry quickly carried him outside, and he died within a few minutes. An eerie silence then fell upon the Prefettura and every light went out.

Captain Campbell stole back into the house to check for further signs of enemy activity and then ran around to the rear of the building where the covering party had been left. The Commandos were there, crouching in the darkness, but they heard no password and thought that Campbell was a German. A Sten gun round smashed his shin bone. He ordered his men to withdraw and leave him behind. The raiding party was left without an officer.

Sergeant Terry took over. He brought up enough explosives to demolish the Prefettura but discovered that the fuses were rain-soaked and unusable. The only damage that the raiders could inflict now was by dropping a grenade down the breather pipe and blowing up the main generator and by destroying some Afrika Korps vehicles. Terry and the other survivors then withdrew, hoping that the enemy would tend their wounded. Several Commandos had been captured by Germans alerted to their assault.

By the following evening of November 18, the 22 survivors reached Colonel Laycock at the shore. Then followed several frustrating hours while their signals to HMS Torbay—surfaced 400 yards out—were unacknowledged. Belated return signals to the exhausted Commandos were incomprehensible, and no boats came in to fetch them. So, just before dawn the following morning, Laycock and the survivors filed into a wadi to lay low for the day and plan how to get to the British lines. But hostile Arabs and then Italian troops attacked them. Laycock ordered the men to split into small groups and disperse before an inevitable and more serious assault came from the Germans.

All of the Commandos except two were eventually seized by the Germans or shot by Arabs. Colonel Campbell was carried off to a German prison camp, where he was well treated but had to have his shattered leg amputated.

Colonel Laycock and Sergeant Terry managed to get clear of the wadi and spent 41 wearying days trekking across the desert toward the Eighth Army lines. They were given food by friendly Senussi tribesmen, and water was not a problem because it rained almost every day. They reached the British lines on Christmas Day. Captain Haselden also managed to get away from the wadi and linked up with an LRDG patrol. After a rest, Laycock was flown back to England to take command of the Special Service Brigade. The intrepid Haselden, who had been promoted to lieutenant colonel, was killed in a raid on Tobruk in September 1942.

Operation Crusader, the big offensive by Lt. Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham’s Eighth Army for which the Keyes raid was a diversion, had meanwhile got underway. One hundred thousand men, more than 700 Cruiser and Matilda tanks, and 5,000 artillery units, armored cars, trucks, and personnel carriers rolled forward during the weekend of November 16-17.

A masterpiece of deception, Crusader was a wide-scale armored sweep toward besieged Tobruk from the south while British Commonwealth infantry forces pinned down Axis positions on the Libya-Egypt frontier. The Afrika Korps and its Italian allies were driven back to Benghazi with severe losses, and the British kept up the pressure through December.

Rommel was forced to abandon Cyrenaica, the eastern province of Libya, and fall back to defensive positions at El Agheila. But the Desert Fox quickly recovered. The gallant General Cunningham, who had defeated the Italians in Ethiopia but who lacked a grasp of armored warfare, suffered a nervous breakdown. He was soon replaced by the vigorous, self-confident Lt. Gen. Sir Neil Ritchie. From Operation Crusader until the climactic Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, the desert war continued to rage back and forth.

While it was a daring operation carried out with heroism, the raid on Rommel’s headquarters had turned into a costly and unnecessary disaster. British intelligence was correct that the Prefettura in Beda Littoria had been used by the general, but only briefly. It was only by chance that Captain Haselden had spotted him there; Rommel was making a routine visit to the Afrika Korps quartermaster general’s staff, which had taken over the building.

The Desert Fox had long since shifted his lair to a location much closer to the front lines. In fact, and unknown at the British intelligence offices in Cairo, Rommel was not even in North Africa at the time of the raid. He had been flown to Rome two weeks before to rest and celebrate his 50th birthday.

Toward the British raiders who had sought to capture or kill him, Rommel reacted with characteristic chivalry. He defied Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s newly issued directive ordering the immediate execution of captured Commandos and arranged for Colonel Keyes to be buried with full honors. The German general’s chaplain conducted the ceremony as Keyes was laid to rest beside four Afrika Korps soldiers killed in the raid. Rommel gave a funeral oration and, in an unprecedented soldierly gesture, pinned his own Iron Cross on the Briton’s body.

The young colonel was subsequently gazetted on June 19, 1942, and awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest decoration for valor. A memorial service in London’s Westminster Abbey was attended by some of the Commandos who had survived the doomed raid. Colonel Keyes’s remains were later reburied at the Eighth Army cemetery in Benghazi.

The raid served to point up flaws in the training and tactics of British Special Forces units. Eighteen months after the raising of the Commandos, and despite the fighting spirit displayed in Beda Littoria, there was still much to be learned. Inadequate planning and faulty intelligence were stressed as the Combined Operations chiefs critiqued the mission.

The Commandos learned their bitter lessons and went on to serve in many World War II campaigns as a peerless special force—mentoring the U.S. Rangers and setting an example for other elite assault units in the years to come.

Frequent contributor Michael D. Hull has written on numerous topics for WWII History. He resides in Enfield, Connecticut.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Michael D. Hull originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Warfare History Network

Security, Eurasia

The Soviets lost nearly their entire navy, and therefore the whole war, at Tallinn.

Key Point: 

Early in World War II, a bitter joke circulated within the Soviet military. It ran, “What is the first thing Russia does when war is declared? It scuttles the fleet!” The joke referred to sad events in Russian naval history. In 1855, after the Crimean War, Russia lost the right to maintain a fleet in the Black Sea, and in 1904-1905 during the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, Russia lost two out of its three fleets. In 1941, the Soviet Union, born out of old Imperial Russia’s ashes, almost lost its Baltic Fleet.

Containing the Soviet Fleet

In 1940, without firing a shot, the Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland. Along with territorial acquisition, this move was a major coup in projecting Soviet naval presence westward. Besides taking in the tiny navies and merchant marine fleets of the three states, the Soviet Red Banner Baltic Fleet acquired a number of important naval bases on the Baltic Sea. Chief among them was Tallinn, capital of Estonia and a major port city. A chain of several other bases, including a large one at Riga, the Latvian capital, extended farther west along the coast.

On June 22, 1941, mutual expansionist policies inevitably brought Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union into armed conflict. Lacking capital ships in the Gulf of Finland, which rated a low priority, the German Marinekommando Nord fleet consisted mainly of torpedo boats, minesweepers, and submarine flotillas, augmented by the small but skilled Finnish Navy. In contrast, its opponent, the vastly superior Soviet Baltic Fleet, was composed of two battleships, four cruisers, and 15 destroyers plus numerous smaller craft and submarines.

The rapid pace of the German invasion of the Soviet Union took the Soviet High Command by surprise. As German troops briskly pressed eastward through the Baltic States, the Soviet naval bases began falling like dominoes. The escaping Soviet naval vessels were being pushed farther east into the Gulf of Finland. By mid-August 1941, Tallinn had become the westernmost Soviet naval base on the Baltic Sea.

Just days before hostilities began, the German Kriegsmarine and its Finnish allies had begun laying extensive minefields in strategic locations in the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Germans and Finns relied heavily on mines to negate the Soviet advantage and to protect their own shipping lanes. East of Tallinn, in the immediate vicinity of Cape Juminda, was a heavily mined area of the Gulf of Finland. This major minefield was designed to interdict Soviet operations between their Kronstadt base on Kotlin Island near Leningrad and the rest of the Baltic Sea. Overall, more than 2,000 mines were in place in Juminda waters.

From the opening of hostilities, the Soviet Navy lost the initiative despite its numerical and qualitative superiority. Its losses began to mount steadily, mainly falling prey to mines. Hardly a day went by without a ship sunk, often with all hands. Aggressively led German and Finnish light forces effectively cowed the Soviet naval presence in the Baltic.

On the landward side, Red Army forces were led by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, who possessed the highest Soviet military rank but was not a capable military tactician. His paramount attribute was complete political reliability and unquestioning obedience to the instructions of Premier Josef Stalin. Despite his best efforts, Voroshilov was completely unable to shore up his crumbling front.

Driving toward Leningrad, German Army Group North brushed aside the Soviet Eighth Army, the closest Soviet formation to Tallinn. No plans to defend the city from a land-based attack were prepared before the war, and it was too late now. On July 22, the Germans struck at the juncture of the X and XI Rifle Corps of the Eighth Army. As a result of this action, the X Rifle Corps was cut off from the rest of the army and fell back to the vicinity of Tallinn. On August 5, the Germans cut the Tallinn-Leningrad railroad and reached the coast of the Gulf of Finland. Tallinn now lay 200 miles behind the German lines.

The Defense of Tallinn

Responsibility for defending the city and the naval base fell to the commander of the Baltic Sea Fleet, Admiral Vladimir F. Tributs. The Red Army forces available for defense were woefully insufficient, consisting mainly of the depleted X Rifle Corps and the 22nd NKVD (Secret Police) Division, which had performed guard and escort duties in the Baltic states before the war, shuttling prisoners to the horrific gulags.

To supplement the Army troops, any sailors who could be spared from the ships were formed into naval infantry detachments to fight on land. In addition, all naval shore facilities were swept of nonessential personnel, and they were placed in naval infantry detachments as well. These measures produced more than 10,000 sailors to bolster the city’s defenses. Additionally, several militia regiments totaling close to 4,000 Latvian and Estonian communists and volunteers joined the defenders. There was no time to train the sailors and militia units in infantry skills, and they suffered appalling casualties in the subsequent fighting. Initially, there were not enough rifles to arm them, and the weapons had to be flown in from Kronstadt.

Because of the weakness of the ground forces, artillery became the backbone of Tallinn’s defenses. Ships anchored in Tallinn’s harbor provided fire support for ground units. Numerous naval spotter teams were placed with the ground units to facilitate fire control, but frequent communication difficulties made the massive naval gunfire often ineffective. Still, on many occasions, all that prevented German breakthroughs was the tremendous volume of fire provided by the cruiser Kirovand her destroyer escorts. Additional fire support came from large-caliber shore batteries, some mounting 305mm guns.

As the Germans came closer and closer, the Red Air Force lost its airfields as well, with most of the surviving aircraft flying east where they joined in the defense of Leningrad. A small number of older Ilyushin I-16 fighters belonging to the Soviet Navy continued operating for a time from a tiny landing strip jammed between a fishing village and the water’s edge. Eventually, they followed their Air Force counterparts eastward, and Tallinn was left without air support.

On August 21, the Germans breached the defenses of the city itself. Despite valiant efforts, the dwindling Soviet forces could not hold them back. Tallinn’s harbor was now within range of German field artillery, and Soviet ships began taking hits. This caused the ships to frequently change positions, reducing the effectiveness of their fire and further weakening the land defenses.

The Red Army Evacuates

Despite the gravity of their situation, nobody at the headquarters of the Baltic Sea Fleet, including Admiral Tributs, dared to ask Voroshilov for permission to evacuate the city. Punishment for being labeled a “panic-monger” was very real, often carrying the death penalty. Finally, on August 25, Tributs went over Voroshilov’s head and submitted a carefully phrased request for instructions to Chief of the Navy Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov. The last portion of the report stated, “The harbors and piers are under enemy fire. The Military Council … is requesting your instructions and decisions concerning the ships, units of the 10th Corps and fleet shore defenses in case of enemy breakthrough into town itself and the pullback of our forces to the sea. Embarkation on transports in this eventuality would be impossible.” Tributs’s concern mirrored Admiral Kuznetsov’s own misgivings, and he took this matter directly to the high command. After much deliberation, permission to evacuate Tallinn and break through to Kronstadt was finally granted late on the evening of August 26.

With permission granted, the Soviets began frantic planning for the evacuation of over 200 ships and close to 40,000 military personnel and civilians. The ships gathered in Tallinn’s harbor were a hodgepodge of both warships and support vessels ranging in size from massive civilian passenger liners converted into transports to the heavy cruiser Kirov, destroyers, submarines, and tugboats.

Fortunately, while waiting for final orders, senior Soviet commanders had already put together contingency plans for evacuation. Now these plans had to be finalized and last-minute corrections made. At the same time, special teams began destroying military equipment that could not be evacuated. The city’s utilities and other infrastructure were also rendered inoperable to deny their use to the enemy.

Three Routes of Retreat

There were three routes of retreat to Kronstadt through the Gulf of Finland, which is only 20 nautical miles wide in some places. The northern route, close to the Finnish shore and under the enemy air support umbrella, was immediately ruled unacceptable even though it was almost completely free of mines. According to intelligence reports that the British government passed on to its Soviet allies, there were no German capital ships in the Baltic Sea or the Gulf of Finland. Lacking their own intelligence sources, the Soviet commanders still classified the British reports as unconfirmed and unreliable. Without any concrete data about the German surface fleet, Soviet admirals allowed for the possibility of German warships attempting to interfere with the run to Kronstadt.

The southern route would have taken the fleet along almost 200 miles of coastline occupied by German forces. Orders arrived from Voroshilov’s headquarters expressly forbidding Tributs to evacuate his fleet along this route. Ostensibly, these categorical instructions stemmed from the fact that this route would expose the fleet to treacherous and shallow waters and fire from German shore batteries. Several senior officers headed by Rear Admiral Yuriy F. Rall argued that this channel already had been successfully navigated by more than 200 ships. German artillery fire that could be brought to bear on the fleet would be conducted mainly by field artillery, easily countered by the heavier and more numerous guns of the Soviet naval vessels. Even a shore battery mounting 150mm guns captured by Germans at Cape Juminda was no threat to the Soviet ships.

The real reason for denying the southern route was Soviet mistrust of the Latvian and Estonian crews of numerous transports carrying evacuees and equipment. This paranoia was fed for two reasons. There was an incident in which a converted transport captained and crewed largely by Estonian civilian sailors had been intentionally run aground on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland so that the crew could defect to the Germans. It was also feared that the crews of Soviet naval vessels, given an opportunity, might defect to the Germans.

Therefore, the Soviet high command ordered the evacuation from Tallinn to proceed along the middle route, even though it was thickly sown with German and Finnish mines. The Germans and Finns had been mining the waters of the middle route even before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Axis sailors had been amazed at the apparent Soviet passivity.

Planning the Evacuation

The mission was made further hazardous by the dearth of minesweeping vessels. Obsessed with powerful warships, the Soviet shipbuilding industry had severely neglected the production of support vessels, and the Soviet Navy entered the war with a pronounced shortage of minesweeping capability. To further aggravate the problem, those minesweepers that were available were often used in capacities for which they were not designed, especially as transport ships. Admiral Rall and his staff estimated that almost 100 minesweepers would be necessary to adequately lead the Baltic Fleet during the breakout from Tallinn. Instead, only 10 modern minesweepers were available. They were supplemented by 17 older and slower converted trawlers and a dozen converted Navy cutters.

This small number of minesweepers was tasked with the gargantuan responsibility of shepherding more than 200 vessels to safety. The civilian transports, including 22 large ones, were divided into four convoys, each closely guarded by a few small naval vessels and led by older trawler minesweepers. The naval force was split into three elements: the main force, the covering force, and the rear guard. Ten modern minesweepers were allocated five each to lead the first two combat elements, particularly safeguarding the Kirov.

According to plan, the civilian and military convoys were to leave Tallinn on a staggered schedule. The Soviets were well aware of the danger posed to the convoys by mines off Cape Juminda, and they developed a schedule to allow the ships to traverse the minefields during daylight hours.

The evacuation route was divided into two portions, from Tallinn to Gogland Island, roughly in the middle of Gulf of Finland, and from Gogland to Kronstadt. The first section presented the most danger because of the minefields off Cape Juminda and the lack of air cover. Reaching Gogland Island by nightfall, the fleet would be within range of air cover based at Leningrad and Kronstadt. In addition, a task force of ships from Kronstadt was organized and stationed at Gogland to assist in any rescue and recovery efforts.

The whole operation would require very careful timing. Under relentless German pressure, Soviet ground units were barely holding the line on the outskirts of Tallinn. Admiral Tributs and his staff realized that some of these troops would have to be sacrificed and abandoned to fight hopeless rearguard actions, allowing the majority of forces to embark aboard ships. To avoid a panicked retreat to the harbor, the forward units were not informed about the pullback until the afternoon of August 27. Barricades were erected in the streets for the last-ditch defense. But as they observed NKVD troops manning barricades, many people came to realize that the barricades went up not to halt the Germans but to prevent a panicked rush to the harbor.

Chaos at the Pier

By 8 pm, the withdrawal began in earnest under a protective barrage of naval gunfire. Instead of an orderly retreat, the embarkation immediately deteriorated into complete chaos. The Soviet defenders could no longer hold back the Germans, who continually shelled the harbor. Several transport ships, with shells falling around them, were forced to leave their embarkation stations without picking up their designated units and evacuees.

Crowds of soldiers, sailors, and civilians were surging back and forth along the piers, storming the gangways of waiting transports. People were trampled underfoot in the maddened rush to the ships. The scene was punctuated by exploding German artillery shells and backlit by the burning city. “The whole town appeared to be engulfed in flames; burning and exploding,” recalled Admiral Tributs in his memoirs.

While several transports cast off largely empty, the majority of vessels were overcrowded. Writer Nikolai G. Mikhailovskiy, attached to the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet, recalled, “The staterooms are filled to overflowing. People are standing, sitting and lying down in the narrow corridors and on decks. Many, coming off line after sleepless nights, settled on deck. One had to step over them in order to get from one point to another … The whole shore is aflame. It is strange that during a bright sunny day the harbors are darkened by smoke. Signals relayed by flags are impossible to see. The searchlights shine brightly. Only they can penetrate this incredible darkness.”

As the transports filled up, they cast off and slowly moved to their staging areas off Naissar and Aegna Islands across the bay from Tallinn. In many cases, people desperate to get aboard continued clinging to the gangways, often forcing the crews to cut the gangways in order to get clear of the pier. Over 23,000 troops, including more than 4,000 wounded and several thousand civilian evacuees, were taken aboard. Despite Vice Admiral Yuriy A. Panteleyev’s claim in his memoirs that not a single platoon was abandoned to the enemy, almost 10,000 more men were left behind on Tallinn’s piers.

The wind continued picking up throughout August 27, creating choppy seas and further exacerbating the chaotic embarkation. Because of these delays, the first convoy did not sail until noon on August 28, a full 12 hours behind schedule. The naval and civilian convoys stretched in a line more than 15 miles long. Owing to deployed minesweeps, which required slow speeds to be effective, the convoys crept along at under 10 knots.

Bombs from the Air, Bombs in the Sea

Things quickly began to go wrong. Less than one hour into the voyage and several miles east of Aegna Island, one of the minesweeping trawlers leading the first convoy hit a mine and disappeared under the waves within seconds. The appearance of a mine in waters considered to be safe shocked everyone. The most likely explanation for this tragedy was that the heavy winds and waves generated by the previous night’s storm tore loose the moorings of a mine and the gulf’s current carried it into the midst of the Soviet ships. This loss was the forewarning of swarms of loose mines that were to plague the Soviet convoys for the next two days.

Undeterred, the convoy sailed on. German bombers appeared overhead and cautiously attacked the strung-out convoys. The Soviet Navy ships, spaced along the line of civilian transports, put up a spirited antiaircraft barrage and managed to keep the German planes at bay for a time.

Around 6 pm, the first civilian convoy arrived off Cape Juminda and its minefields. The nightmare began. At 6:05, a large explosion went up at the head of the convoy. The transport Ella, a passenger ship converted into a military transport, hit a mine and began to sink. The tugboat S-101, following in her wake and herself overloaded with evacuees, moved in to assist and hit a mine as well, virtually disintegrating. Of more than 1,000 passengers and crew aboard Ella, most of them wounded, fewer than 100 people were subsequently rescued. No one was saved from S-101.

German aircraft now renewed their attacks. Shortly after Ella went down, the icebreaker Voldemarswas hit by a bomb and sunk with significant loss of life. The large transport Vironia, a converted liner, was damaged by two near misses. Its upper decks, thickly packed with evacuees, were swept by steel fragments, tossing people aside in disfigured heaps and throwing overboard many passengers, both alive and dead. The rescue vessel Saturn moved in and took the damaged transport in tow. Several minesweepers, desperately attempting to keep the 200-meter channel clear, hit mines themselves and went down in quick succession.

Under relentless air attacks, Soviet ships were forced to maneuver to avoid the bombs. This compelled them to leave the narrow channel cleared by the minesweepers. Several naval vessels went down as if chasing each other to the bottom of the gulf. One of them was Saturn, leaving the practically immobile Vironia bobbing in the water.

Around 6:30, with the Soviet convoys floundering in the minefields in full view of Cape Juminda, a German battery, well-camouflaged in the wooded terrain, opened fire on the Soviet ships. However, its 150mm guns were no match for the ships’ heavier armament. One of the destroyers closed in and laid down a thick smoke screen, while Kirov replied with several volleys of its nine 180mm main guns. It was unknown whether the German battery was destroyed, but it fell silent.

More Casualties to Mines

There was no safety anywhere. Just before 10 pm, the submarine S-5, closely following Kirov on the surface, hit a mine and disappeared under the waves. Shortly thereafter, Kirov caught a mine in the right paravane, forcing the cruiser to stop. While a welder was lowered almost to the water’s surface to cut loose the metal pole with a torch, another mine became entangled in the left paravane. Valuable time was lost cutting loose and replacing both paravanes. While this was going on, the destroyer Gordiy, escorting the cruiser, hit a mine and lost mobility. It was eventually able to get moving again and limped to Kronstadt on its own.

Shortly after Gordiy was damaged, the venerable Yakov Sverdlov, originally commissioned in 1913 as Novik and lending its name to a class of destroyers, went down. Enjoying a distinguished combat record in World War I, this ship held a special place in Tributs’s heart as the only vessel the admiral had ever commanded. He witnessed the Sverdlov’s demise from Kirov’s bridge: “At 20:47 hours, suddenly a column of fire and smoke 200-250 meters high burst out from under Yakov Sverdlov’s body and settled down hissing, burying the surviving crew members … only several dozens of men were saved.”

As more and more ships sank or became disabled, the convoys lost cohesion and became intermingled. Naval detachments, moving on a nearly parallel course to the civilian convoys, often passed by the vulnerable and defenseless transports without providing fire support for them.

In the gathering darkness, lookouts were posted on the ships’ bows to spot mines. At about 10 pm, a mine exploded near the destroyer Minsk, the flagship of Rear Admiral Pantelyev. The explosion reverberated through the destroyer, bursting seams in multiple compartments and leaving the vessel inoperable. Pantelyev ordered another destroyer, the Skoriy, to render assistance. The majority of Pantelyev’s staff officers transferred to the other destroyer. Skoriy hardly had time to cast off and attempt to take Minsk in tow before also striking a mine, breaking in two, and sinking in front of stunned onlookers.

The slaughter continued. The frigate Tsiklon went down, falling prey to a mine. Only 15 minutes after Skoriy was lost, another destroyer, Slavniy, was soon damaged but remained afloat and continued moving under its own power. Shortly thereafter, the destroyer Kalinin, with Rear Admiral Rall aboard, hit a mine and began slowly sinking. As the destroyer Volodarskiy was transferring wounded crewmen from the Kalinin, it hit a mine as well and went under. Admiral Rall, suffering from a concussion, was taken aboard a cutter. The destroyer Artyom also went down.

The toll of noncombatant vessels was also high. The damaged transport Vironia hit a mine and sank. Even a near miss from an exploding bomb would create havoc on ships overflowing with evacuees. The fate of immobilized wounded men, swathed in bandages and plaster and often trapped below decks in compartments blazing with fire or filling with icy water, was particularly terrifying. The ships of the first civilian convoy experienced particularly heavy casualties.

The Convoy Recuperates

As the convoys doggedly continued eastward, many of them had to navigate through floating debris fields and spreading oil slicks of destroyed and damaged vessels. In many instances, unable to stop, they mowed under the survivors bobbing in the water among dead bodies. Whenever possible, though, every effort was extended to rescue the survivors. Still, hundreds perished, succumbing to wounds and exposure. Hundreds more were plucked from sure death in cold water, desperately clinging to whatever pieces of debris that would float. In one truly miraculous instance, a sailor was rescued after clinging to a floating mine for hours.

Throughout the day there were multiple false sightings of German submarines. Every time a phantom periscope was spotted on the surface, one or two destroyers or sub chasers would dart out and drop depth charges. Despite multiple claims by Soviet eyewitnesses, no German submarine operated in the area at the time.

Worried about attacks by German and Finnish torpedo boats as well, the Soviet ships twice opened fire on a group of unidentified small vessels racing toward the fleet. Because of the lack of coordination and communication, the torpedo boats thought to be enemy vessels turned out to be a Soviet detachment returning from screening and scouting north of the main channel. The friendly fire incident resulted in one Soviet torpedo boat taking a direct hit and disintegrating.

With darkness falling, it became impossible to navigate the mine-studded waters, and Admiral Tributs ordered all ships to halt where they were. Even though this went against accepted naval doctrine, the halt at least eliminated the possibility of ships running into stationary mines. German aircraft disappeared with nightfall as well, and now the only danger lay with floating mines cast adrift in the waves. On most ships men lined up along the sides, armed with poles for pushing away the mines. In many cases volunteers took turns jumping into the water to guide the mines away from the ships with their bare hands.

During the halt, almost no crewmen were able to rest. Those not directly standing watch or dealing with floating mines were frantically conducting whatever repairs they could. Small cutters darted from ship to ship assessing damage. The scope of the disaster began to take shape. The destroyer force, representing the bulk of Tributs’s naval contingent, was cut in half. Admiral Rall’s rearguard force ceased to exist, and he was injured. Of the main force, only one destroyer and one frigate still accompanied the Kirov. Even worse, a significant number of the priceless minesweepers had been lost.

Abandoning the Transports

At dawn on August 29, good weather meant the return of marauding German bombers. Having moved clear of the minefields, the naval vessels, now unencumbered by mine sweeps and paravanes, raced ahead at more than 20 knots. Around 5 pm, Kirov’s group arrived at Kronstadt. Its hasty departure left the virtually defenseless transports at the mercy of German aircraft, which appeared around 7 am.

While significant numbers of German planes pursued the departing warships, especially concentrating on Kirov’s group, the majority of Luftwaffe aircraft fell upon the defenseless civilian transports. Beset by German dive-bombers, most transport captains gave up any hope of reaching Kronstadt. At most, they hoped to reach Gogland Island and disgorge their human cargo before German bombs could send them to the bottom of the gulf.

Shortly before 8 am, the large transport Kazakhstan, loaded with almost 5,000 soldiers and civilian evacuees, was damaged by bombs. Its captain, N. Kalitaev, was tossed overboard by the shockwave. Severe panic ensued aboard, with people jumping into the water. After heroic efforts, however, the crew of the transport managed to make minimal repairs and keep the ship afloat. After being thrown overboard and suffering a concussion, Kalitaev was rescued by a submarine and delivered to Kronstadt on the evening of August 29, a full day before Kazakhstan limped in. Arrested by the NKVD and accused of cowardice and abandoning his post, Kalitaev was promptly shot despite multiple testimonies of his innocence.

Under a rain of German bombs, the transports continued their race to Gogland. On many ships the soldiers desperately attempted to keep German aircraft at bay with rifle and pistol fire. As the hours ticked by, transport losses mounted to include Naissaar, Ergonautis, Balkhash, Tobol, Ausma, Kalpaks, Evald, Atis Kronvaldis, Skrunda, and Alev.

Several damaged transports managed to limp to Gogland and run themselves aground, disembarking their passengers. German aircraft easily found the immobile transports and finished them off. By the end of the day the burned-out hulks of transports Vtoraya Pyatiletka, Ivan Papanin, Lake Lucerne, and floating workshop Serp-i-Molot smoked on Gogland’s beaches. Still, despite tragic losses, more than 12,000 people were offloaded on Gogland Island and eventually shuttled to Kronstadt and Leningrad. But before they were taken off the island, German aircraft made several low-level passes, strafing the survivors with machine guns and dropping bombs. Scores of people who thought themselves safe died on this tiny speck of land.

As the transports were being pounded into oblivion by German aircraft, scores of smaller vessels slipped by Gogland Island and headed to Kronstadt. They continued the struggle until the afternoon of August 30. The Tallinn breakout was over.

A Success or a Disaster?

Events at Tallinn were comparable to the Allied evacuation of Dunkirk over a year earlier. At Dunkirk, 338,000 Allied soldiers escaped the Germans. This was accomplished under British air cover and over a much shorter distance, 20 miles compared with 200 at Tallinn.

The results of the Tallinn breakout are disputed as simultaneously a success and a disaster. Despite the loss of more than 11,000 evacuees, including roughly 3,000 civilians, almost 17,000 people, mostly evacuated ground troops, reached Leningrad and joined in the defense of the city. The Kirov was saved, along with the destroyers Minsk and Leningrad. Of the original 10 destroyers, five were lost, mostly of the old Novik class. The guns mounted on Kirov and the destroyers assisted in the defense of Leningrad, and the majority of the smaller naval vessels made it back as well. The real losses were among the civilian vessels, with more than 40 of them, including 19 large transports, sunk.

The Soviet government offered little official comment about the events. To this day, virtually no declassified information exists on the evacuation of Tallinn.

Originally Published in 2018.

This article by Victor J. Kamenir originally appeared on the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Dan Goure

M1 Abrams, Europe

Helping frontline nations such as Poland acquire the means to operate as a stand-in force is of vital importance to the Alliance’s deterrence mission.

NATO’s 2021 summit in Brussels came and went without much fanfare, largely overshadowed by the Biden-Putin meeting that immediately followed. Yet significant steps were taken with respect to enhancing the Alliance’s security. Chief among these was a clear statement by the Biden administration of its support for NATO. Washington also reaffirmed the importance of the Article V commitment to respond to an attack on one Alliance member as an attack on all.

The summit’s communique stated the Alliance’s determination to strengthen and modernize the NATO force structure both now and, in the future, to ensure deterrence. In addition, the communique put members on record that they would build a flexible, agile, and resilient force architecture “with the right forces in the right place at the right time.”

But for what contingencies? While the NATO summit discussed a range of threats to allies’ security, it made clear that the primary focus of NATO’s deterrence and defense mission was Russia. In this context, the communique noted the significant growth of the military threat Moscow poses to the free and democratic nations of Europe.

“We reaffirm our commitment to respond in a measured, balanced, coordinated, and timely way to Russia’s growing and evolving array of conventional and nuclear-capable missiles, which is increasing in scale and complexity and which poses significant risks from all strategic directions to security and stability across the Euro-Atlantic area,” the communique stated. “We will continue to implement a coherent and balanced package of political and military measures to achieve Alliance objectives, including strengthened integrated air and missile defence; advanced defensive and offensive conventional capabilities.”

The 2021 summit also reaffirmed the importance of NATO 2030, the Allies’ plan to ensure that NATO remains strong politically, militarily, and technologically through the next decade. Recognizing that more than strong words were necessary, the members directed the secretary-general to make concrete proposals for implementing a more robust capability to respond to a range of threats.

In response to this directive, the secretary-general commissioned a Reflection Group in 2019 to propose concrete actions that the Alliance could undertake to meet objectives identified in the NATO 2030 document. The Reflection Group called on the Alliance to focus its military investments on portions of Alliance territory under threat from Russia. In particular, it concluded that NATO should do more to strengthen defenses along its eastern flank. In its final report, the Reflection Group recommended that “NATO must maintain adequate conventional and nuclear military capabilities and possess the agility and flexibility to confront aggression across the Alliance’s territory, including where Russian forces are either directly or indirectly active, particularly on NATO’s eastern flank (emphasis added). Non-U.S. Allies need to step up their efforts to ensure that their financial commitments and military contributions match NATO’s strategic needs and can deliver an effective balance between U.S. commitments and the development of other Allies’ capabilities.”

NATO has taken important steps to strengthen its capabilities along its eastern flank to deter Russian aggression. The presence of NATO forces in the area has been enhanced by the deployment of multi-national groups in frontline nations. Notably, fighter aircraft from different NATO countries are providing routine air policing above the Baltic states.

The United States has significantly enhanced its military presence along the eastern flank, including around the Baltic and Black Seas. In November 2020, Warsaw and Washington signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement that provided for the stationing of U.S. forces and military equipment on Polish territory. These include the rotational presence of an armored brigade combat team (ABCT), prepositioned stock for an additional ABCT, key enablers such as long-range fires and drones, and the forward element of the newly reactivated V Corps.

NATO members on the front line with Russia—the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania—have taken concerted steps to enhance their capabilities to confront the threat posed by improving Russian conventional forces. The Baltic states and Poland have each met or exceeded the NATO defense spending goal of two percent of their GDP. All have sought to replace their aging Soviet-era equipment with modern Western systems that also provide enhanced interoperability.  

Poland, the keystone to the defense of NATO’s eastern flank, has undertaken a long-term, multi-billion-dollar program to modernize its military. Poland has acquired the Patriot air and missile defense systems and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System long-range rocket artillery platform. Most recently, it signed a contract for fifth-generation F-35 fighter jets.

U.S. and NATO forces along the eastern flank are the equivalent of the stand-in force Commandant David Berger envisions for the U.S. Marine Corps. They will be operating from the start of a conflict within the engagement zones of Russian long-range anti-access and area denial capabilities. They must be able to withstand an initial blow, slow down the advance of Russian forces, and strike critical targets.

To pose the kind of deterrent that would dissuade Russia from military adventurism, Poland needs to finish modernizing the remainder of its tank fleet before Russia can achieve an overwhelming advantage in conventional forces. Poland’s army still operates some five  hundred obsolete Russian-designed tanks that are more than thirty years old. The Biden administration should encourage and support a Polish effort to acquire the M1 Abrams tank.

This action would have several benefits. First, it would substantially improve Poland’s capabilities for high-end heavy combat. When it comes to conventional war, even in the twenty-first century, tanks matter. Second, it would send a further signal to Moscow that Washington intends to back up its words in support of NATO with deeds. Third, it would support interoperability between Polish and U.S. forces and improve sustainment for the Polish military.

Helping frontline nations such as Poland acquire the means to operate as a stand-in force is of vital importance to the Alliance’s deterrence mission. Providing Poland with a version of the M1 Abrams tank and encouraging its industry to be involved in sustaining U.S. and Polish Abrams tanks would be a significant statement of NATO’s commitment to the defense of its eastern flank.

Dan Gouré, Ph.D., is a vice president at the public-policy research think tank Lexington Institute. Goure has a background in the public sector and U.S. federal government, most recently serving as a member of the 2001 Department of Defense Transition Team. You can follow him on Twitter at @dgoure and the Lexington Institute @LexNextDC.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Child Tax Credit,

One of the criticisms of government assistance—both the Child Tax Credit in previous years and the last three rounds of stimulus payments—is that it is often not means-tested strictly enough.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Children who provide at least half of their own financial support—child actors, for instance—are not eligible for the credit.

Starting on July 15, roughly thirty-six million American households will receive the first of six Child Tax Credit payments. Each month from July until December, eligible families will receive either $250 or $300 per child per month, depending on the child’s age. At the end of the six-month period, the families will have received half of the total tax credit; the other half can be deducted from a family’s taxes when it comes time to file in April 2022.

Around 92 percent of all American families will be eligible for the Child Tax Credit. However, this means that just under one in ten families will not receive it. This is largely because of the income restrictions included with the tax credit, but there are a number of other, less common reasons a family might be ineligible, too.

Making Too Much Money

One of the criticisms of government assistance—both the Child Tax Credit in previous years and the last three rounds of stimulus payments—is that it is often not means-tested strictly enough. For instance, in 2011, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, then worth $18 billion, was able to claim $4000 in Child Tax Credit assistance for his four children.

The updated Child Tax Credit payments, passed in March 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act, have partially addressed this problem. Prior to the legislation, the upper income cut-off for Child Tax Credit payments was $400,000 for couples and $200,000 for single parents. The March bill reduced it to $150,000 for couples and $75,000 for single parents.

If a person makes more than this amount, then they might still receive a partial credit, but the payment amount will be substantially decreased.

Other Disqualifications

Parents who share joint custody of their children cannot both qualify for the credit; one or the other must be eligible. Along the same lines, children must live with the receiving parent for at least six months out of the year.

Additionally, both the recipient and the dependent must be U.S. citizens, although if one parent is a non-citizen, the family as a whole is still eligible for the credit.

Children must have either a social security number or an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number to receive the credit. Children with only Adoption Taxpayer Identification Numbers are not eligible.

Finally, children who provide at least half of their own financial support—child actors, for instance—are not eligible for the credit.

A Note to Non-Filers

The IRS is basing its payment scheme based off of the 2019 and 2020 tax returns for families. This means a family that received the Child Tax Credit in 2020 will likely receive it again this year, if their children are still below the age of eighteen.

The reliance on previous tax returns means that the IRS does not know to send the credit to non-filers. However, non-filers are still eligible for the credit; they simply have to register on the IRS’s website, using a portal specially created for this purpose. The payment will be sent out, even if a recipient does not ordinarily make enough money to pay taxes in the first place.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters